Dismantling Truth

The truth has lost its value in recent years. So much so, we live in what is called the post-truth era. Today, truth is variable. There is your truth, my truth, his truth, their truth. There could be as many truths as people.

Although 2016 is commonly agreed to be the year that the post-truth era became the defining feature of global political and media culture, this belief has been creeping into our daily lives for a long time. The term “post-truth” was first coined by playwright Steve Tesich in a 1992 essay for The Nation. Tesich argued that the public had begun to prefer comforting lies over uncomfortable truths. He wrote: “We are rapidly becoming prototypes of a people that totalitarian monsters could only drool about in their dreams. . . We, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world.”