WHEN FACTS NO LONGER MATTER

President Donald Trump will relinquish his office at noon on January 20, 2021. While he is leaving the White House, his legacy will remain with us for some time to come. Among the details most of us will have difficulty forgetting is what appeared to have been a deliberate attempt at obscuring objective truths, rather than sticking to using unbiased observable facts not influenced by his personal feelings or opinions. It began early on, two days after his inauguration, on January 22, 2017, when his counselor Kellyanne Conway, during a "Meet the Press" interview, defended Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statements about attendance numbers during the president's inaugural. When Chuck Todd pressed her to explain why Spicer would utter a provable falsehood, she stated that the press secretary was simply providing "alternative facts," the first time many of us were exposed to that term. Since then we have been bombarded with alternative "facts," half truths and blatant lies. As of August 27 of this year, the Washington Post's database logged 22,247 claims that could be categorized as misinformation or disinformation. During most of his time in office, observers counted close to 50 plus untruths each day. The White House has denied that objective truth actually exists. Mr. Trump's current lawyer Rudy Giuliani has explained that "truth isn't truth." "There is no way to determine who is lying and who is not" he insists. "Truth is inherently partisan. It is whatever you prefer or believe." It did not take long for the pundits to begin comparing the deliberate misstatements by the Trump administration with what George Orwell referred to in "1984" as "double speak" and "double think," a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate its political base and develop the acceptance of or mental capacity to accept contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time. Typical examples of this Orwellian concept are: "War is peace," "freedom is slavery," and "ignorance is strength." Trump's Orwellian "double speak" began with the lie about the size of his inauguration crowd, continuing with his early assurance that the coronavirus will go away like a miracle, and finally with his election meddling, during which, contrary to objective facts, the president maintains that he actually won "by a lot." Consequently, many in his base believe he did. "The Trump m.o. is not to lie convincingly. It is, in fact, the opposite - to distort the truth so blatantly that going along requires a cultish willingness to suspend disbelief." (Mother Jones, Oct. 9, 2020). Arguments made on behalf of the president are often ridiculous to the point of bordering insanity. Mr. Giuliani, for instance, advanced the belief that systemic election fraught perpetrated by the democrats during this past cycle was so refined that there was no discernible proof. At the same time, millions of believers are falling prey to a mass delusion about a secretive cannibalistic cabal popularized by Q-Anon. Mr. Trump maintains he does not know this group, except that they seem to like him. None of this is exclusive to the United States. Autocrats in numerous countries make use of deliberate misinformation - a.k.a. propaganda - to indoctrinate receptive populations. The idea is to flood their populations with so many alternative explanations that people begin giving up on the facts. It did not take long for political scientists to characterize the phenomenon as "post truth," an object of study for several different fields. "Post truth" became the Oxford dictionary word of the year in 2016. It describes the subject as a condition where objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. It identifies a growing international trend to where some feel emboldened to bend reality to fit their opinions, rather than the other way around. In substance, this is not a new concept. Historian and sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) drew a distinction between facts and values. He postulated that facts can be determined through the method of a value-free, objective social science, while values are derived through culture and religion, the truth of which can not be known through science. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) believed that humans created concepts through which they define the good and just, thereby replacing the concept of truth with the concept of values. Today "post truth" refers to a "philosophical and political concept for the disappearance of shared objective standards for truth," and the "circuitous slippage between facts or alt-facts, knowledge, opinion, belief and truth." When objective truth is replaced by a constant flow of disinformation, democracy is in peril. To quote former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who knew the Trump administration intimately, from a May 16, 2018 commencement address at the Virginia Military Institute: "If our leaders seek to conceal the truth or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom. This is the life of nondemocratic societies, comprised of people who are not free to seek the truth." Theo Wierdsma