Truth and truth-telling in the age of Trump

This is a slightly extended and annotated version of a talk given at TEDXRuakura event at the University of Waikato on the 20th August 2017.¹

1. Imagine that you have been lied to by your partner or closest friend. It’s a hurtful lie and you feel let down and disappointed. Lying is a violation of trust and it destroys relationships.² A lie has social and political consequences. A single lie can bring down a political party or a government.³ Hitler coined the expression the ‘big lie’ in Mein Kampf (1925) to describe a lie so ‘colossal’ everybody would believe it because no one would believe that the truth could be distorted so infamously.⁴

2. Have you ever tried to hold a conversation with someone who lives in a fantasy world and you suspect everything said is just wild exaggeration? You might be dealing with a pathological liar.⁵ Typically, a pathological liar is also narcissistic, selfish, and delusional: lying becomes compulsive and habitual. Pathological liars suffer false memory syndrome; many believe they have accomplished superhuman feats. This kind of compulsive lying is regarded as a psychiatric disorder.

3. We all lie on occasion, most of us might tell a ‘white lie’ to save someone’s feelings but most of the time we tell the truth.⁶ We are bought up in our culture with a deep respect for telling the truth. Some would argue that in our culture we are compelled to tell the truth about ourselves and our feelings, even when the consequences might be painful. Sharing our private lives and confiding in others creates intimacy and relationships.

4. In the age of social media, there is a fascination with the lives of ordinary people. We have become the confessional society. Reality TV rules! Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth not only in the social media but also in the court room, in the newsroom, and in the classroom.⁷ Truth is central to all our institutions.⁸

5. Human communication is only possible against a background of truth and truth-telling. Can you imagine a society based on systematic lying where no speech is reliable? You couldn’t believe a stranger giving street directions, or trust a newspaper report, or a friend who confides in you.⁹

6. Truth is a deep cultural practice in the West, yet we take it for granted and only question it when we are exposed to the consequences or effects of a lie. But truth takes different historical forms and changed its shape over time.¹⁰

7. The Ancient Greeks had a concept called Aletheia meaning ‘unconcealed’ or ‘openness’. Truth was seen a form of ontological disclosure. In Greek mythology, Aletheia (Veritas in the Roman world) is the daughter of Zeus and the goddess of truth (vs gods of trickery, deception, and lies).¹¹ The ancient poet, Homer¹², uses the word in the Iliad and the Odyssey to mean truth where truth has to do with the reliability of what is said by one person to another. Its opposite is a lie or deception. ‘Then verily, child, I will tell you the truth’ is a ritual sentence that occurs five times in the Odyssey. The word often occurs in the phrase ‘the whole truth’. To tell the whole truth in this sense is not just to utter some sentence which is true, it is to give a whole account, to tell the whole story.¹³ In the Iliad (23.361), Achilles asks Phoenix to act as umpire in a chariot-race and to report back the truth.¹⁴

8. The traditional oath required of a witness in court proceedings—to ‘tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’—dates from this ancient source over 3,000 years ago.¹⁵ In this ancient tradition, Aletheia is a matter of being truthful and open in one person’s dealings with another, so that what is said can be taken by hearers as reliable and trustworthy.

It seems all classical cultures have a notion like truth.¹⁶

9. Chinese philosophy uses the term the Dao which means ‘way’, in the sense of ‘path’. The Dao also refers to a philosophical tradition concerned with moral education and right action. It functions like ‘truth’ in the Western tradition. Dao is the intuitive knowing of ‘life’ that cannot be grasped theoretically but can be known only through actual living experience of one’s everyday life. It represents the underlying natural order of the Universe and refers to the spiritual enlightenment that follows from living the proper way.¹⁷

10. In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths comprise the essence of Buddha’s teachings. They include the truth of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering which can be learned as the realities of the world by those who have reached nirvana. ‘I teach suffering, its origin, cessation and path. That’s all I teach’, the Buddha declared 2500 years ago.¹⁸

11. The Persian philosopher Avicenna in The Book of Healing, following Aristotle, defines truth as that which in the mind corresponds to what is outside it.¹⁹ The Islamic tradition puts a premium on truth-telling and avoidance of lying and deception.

I will not claim that truth is universal to all cultures but it certainly seems to underwrite the classical religious civilizations.

12. Testament—now here’s an interesting word: testament means testimony, witness, evidence, proof—all relating to truth. One source very influential in Western culture is the New Testament. In John 14: verse 6, Jesus says: ‘I am the way and the truth and the life’. He says to his followers: ‘… you will know the truth and the truth will set you free’ (John, 8:32). Truth is considered part of the Godhead; in Christianity, truth is divine²⁰ (and as Augustine says much later, lying is a sin²¹).²² One historical consequence is that Truth is associated with spiritual freedom and later political freedom, and is also expressible in language—the basis for the secularization of truth in science in the seventeenth century, when truth becomes a property of sentences.

A very brief history of the concept of truth reveals that it changes its meaning over time.

13. In the Middle Ages, truth shifts from a subjective concept associated with my ‘troth’, meaning my word or oath, into a more objective one used in the political realm to refer to legal documents. Truth comes to mean ‘being in accord with reality’ or in accord with the facts.²³ This is the essence of empirical science where true means an accurate description of reality.

14. In 1684, Gottfried Leibniz, a German philosopher, makes a distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact, that is, between necessary truths and contingent truths.²⁴ Truths of reason are mathematic truths like 2 + 2 = 4 which is true by virtue of the meaning of the + and = signs. Truths of fact are true by virtue of being an accurate description of reality and correspond to a state of affairs in the world.

15. Science is distinguished by its success in describing the world, by its problem-solving, predictive, and explanatory power even though its rationality and progress is open to question. This is the basis for science and scientific method. When claims to knowledge don’t meet these standards, we call them pseudo-science. It’s the difference between astronomy and astrology.²⁵

16. In the West, besides scientific and mathematical truth, we also have a tradition of truth-telling.²⁶ It was initiated by Socrates revolving around four questions: ‘who is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relation to power’. These practices link truth-telling to the law, to education, to history, to the media, and to ourselves. In ancient Greek and Roman cultures, truth-telling was a risky business linked to the duty to help others:

A truth-teller sometimes risks his life and uses his freedom to choose frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self- interest and moral apathy.²⁷

17. In Western philosophy, following Plato, we talk of ‘Knowledge as Justified True Belief’²⁸—that is, for something to be knowledge it must have a belief condition, a truth condition, and a justification condition. In the shift to information and the media society, these conditions don’t apply. There is no belief, truth, or justification condition: there is just information and it may be misinformation or disinformation.

18. But today we live in a post-truth era! Is ‘post-truth’ a real word? The Oxford Dictionary named it word of the year in 2016. ‘Post-truth’ refers to a situation where appeals to emotion and personal belief trump objective facts.²⁹

19. The Economist ran an article ‘Post-truth politics: Art of the lie’³⁰ referring to Donald Trump during his campaign when he claimed that Barack Obama ‘is the founder’ of Islamic State along with Hillary Clinton. Imagine that Obama and Clinton the founders of the worst terrorist movement the West has ever known. Even his supporters were perplexed!³¹

20. Brexit and Trump’s triumph in the US elections indicate a dramatic turn against the global liberal internationalist order. It has fueled the coincidence of older conservative social values, anti-immigration sentiments, and climate change denial. White working-class folk from the deindustrialized areas in the US got left behind when American manufacturing went East in search of cheap labor. Arguably, this group is less educated, more open to conspiracy theories, and less likely to change their deeply seated beliefs in the face of evidence.

21. I know this region well as I was invited to join the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, small town America in the mid-West about an hour and a half south of Chicago. I spent 6 years there arriving in 2005 in time to spend a couple of days campaigning for Obama. I went across the state line to Indianna, the home of the revived KKK, to do some door knocking. I saw a white women in a blue jump suit with long blond hair, driving a red pick-up truck. She was screaming racial obscenities at me. My US friends warned me about not pushing too hard. Later I wrote a book called Obama and the End of the American Dream (2012). Today I am writing another book, this time about Donald Trump and post-truth.³² He too uses the resource of the narrative of the American Dream but it’s a very different application and largely a negative, divisive, and confrontational story.

22. Trump’s style and his ‘America first’ policies are delivered by Twitter. It’s a form of media that lacks reflection and fact-checking. Post-truth media is linked to the ‘sound bite’ and ‘photo opportunity’. It completely bypasses public discussion in the regime of the 24-h news cycle. There is no opportunity for discussion or argument, just empty and unverifiable statements issued in the deafening echo chamber of social media.³³

23. Now ‘fake news’ is full of hoaxes, misinformation, and distortion. It is published with the intent of deceiving. It takes the ‘big lie’ to another level as the postmodern art of politics where supporters believe something only if it agrees with their own deep-seated prejudices.³⁴ Welcome to the flat earth society that turns its back on truth!

24. So what are we to make of this? That’s entirely up to you, but I will leave you with this final thought. George Orwell said: ‘In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act’.³⁵

Michael A. Peters
University of Waikato,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
[email protected]

Notes

1. ‘TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group’ https://tedxruakura.com/.

2. James Mahon (2016) states that ‘There is no universally accepted definition of lying. The dictionary definition of lying is “to make a false statement with the intention to deceive” (OED 1989) but there are numerous problems with this definition.’ See Sissela Bok’s (1978) , Lying: Moral Choice in Private and Public Life; and Don Fallis (2010) ‘Lying and deception’; see also Dan Schneider Video Interview #187: On Truth: Philosopher Michael Peters, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ-WRAEmIEs; and https://www.ted.com/playlists/222/5_talks_on_the_truth_about_lyi.

3. This was a reference to Metiria Turei, co-leader of the NZ Green Party, who was forced to resign having lied to keep her Domestic Purposes Benefit when she was a solo mother during 1993–1998. Most New Zealanders thought she was wrong to lie and her benefit fraud was unacceptable. By comparison, Donald Trump as US President lies as a daily routine—see ‘Trump’s lies’ by Leonhardt and Thompson in The New York Times (21 July 2017) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html?mcubz=0.

4. According to Hitler, the ‘big lie’ is a propaganda technique typically used by ‘the Jews’. It was a technique understood and used by Goebbels. The ‘big lie’ stands in contrast to ‘the Noble lie’ which is a foundation myth, generally religious, propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony. The classic use is by Plato in The Republic. Leo Strauss suggests that foundation myths are required by all governments. Schofield (2007) writes: ‘Socrates’ introduction of the Republic’s notorious “noble lie” comes near the end of Book 3 (414b-c). “We want one single, grand lie,” he says, “which will be believed by everybody—including the rulers, ideally, but failing that the rest of the city.”’ He continues:

The noble lie is to serve as charter myth for Plato’s good city: a myth of national or civic identity—or rather, two related myths, one grounding that identity in the natural brotherhood of the entire indigenous population (they are all autochthonous, literally born from the earth), the other making the city’s differentiated class structure a matter of divine dispensation (the god who molds them puts different metals in their souls). If people can be made to believe it, they will be strongly motivated to care for the city and for each other. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/the-cambridge-companion-to-platos-irepublici/the-noble-lie/F04B78C5546C7FB5E331248F35068F76

5. While a matter of debate, there is no agreed definition of pathological lying. Charles Dike (2008) writes

PL is characterized by a long history (maybe lifelong) of frequent and repeated lying for which no apparent psychological motive or external benefit can be discerned. While ordinary lies are goal-directed and are told to obtain external benefit or to avoid punishment, pathological lies often appear purposeless. In some cases, they might be self-incriminating or damaging, which makes the behavior even more incomprehensible. http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/pathological-lying-symptom-or-disease

Dike, Baranoski, and Griffith (2005) indicate it was ‘German physician (Dr. Delbruck) who first clearly described the concept of pathological lying after an extensive examination of lies told by five of his patients’ in 1891. There were numerous articles written on the concept in the first half of the twentieth century, although interest in it has waned in the recent past. Often defined after Delbruck as pseudologia fantastica, the commonly accepted definition is that put forth by Healy and Healy (1926, p. 1): ‘falsification entirely disproportionate to any discernible end in view, may be extensive and very complicated, manifesting over a period of years or even a lifetime, in the absence of definite insanity, feeblemindedness or epilepsy’. Dike et al. (2005) write: ‘Psychiatric conditions that have been traditionally associated with deception in one form or another include Malingering, Confabulation, Ganser’s Syndrome, Factitious Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Antisocial Personality Disorder. Lying may also occur in Histrionic and Narcissistic Personality Disorders’. The most recent research on pseudologia fantastica, also called mythomania and pathological lying, can be found at PubMed, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=search&term=pseudologia%20fantastica. Interestingly for this talk and especially in relation to Donald Trump, Clark (2017) writes in his abstract: ‘Between 1890 and 1920, the diagnosis of pathological lying, usually defined as purposeless lying, was widely recognized by American legal experts, social workers, journalists, and the general public’. He

explores the origins of the diagnosis and its cultural importance as an explanation for the perceived prevalence of false reporting, unverifiable accusation, and manufactured ‘news fakes’ in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, intensifying competition for scoops and an increase in libel suits prompted experts and the public to search for the origins of a perceived ‘epidemic of exaggeration’. The emblem of this epidemic became the pathological liar, a deviant publicity-seeker whose pointless deceptions exposed the vulnerability of the press to manipulation. The discovery of pathological lying helped recast the press in public discourse as the target, rather than the agent, of deception.

6. But see Dan Ariely’s (2013) The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves, (New York, Harper) for a view that lying is part of the human condition.

7. See Michel Foucault (2000) Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984; (2001) Fearless Speech and the publication of a previously unknown set of lectures, (2014) Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice. See also Peters (2003) ‘Truth-telling as an Educational Practice of the Self: Foucault, Parrhesia and the ethics of subjectivity’. Foucault’s history of confession since the Middle Ages included an interest in ‘judicial confession, particularly the inquisition; the penitential confession; and confession of sins against the sixth and ninth commandments’. Elden (2005, p. 27) remarks how Foucault

notes how in the eighteenth century mechanisms of confession are deployed in the crusade against childhood masturbation—children must confess to their family, to their family doctor, or to doctors specializing in sexuality. He suggests, but does not elaborate, that ‘this same confessional technique appears in general medicine at the end of the eighteenth century’. Central to understanding its impact, of course, was the use to which it was put in psychiatry.

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault (1990, p. 59) maintains that ‘Western man has become a confessing animal’. In The History of Sexuality (1990, p. 59) he argues:

[Confession] plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell.

Confessional writing, first-person autobiographical style, appeared with Augustine’s Confessions, and later with Jean Jacque Rousseau. Peter Brooks (2000, p. 4) remarks that Western culture from the later Middle Ages to the present day ‘has made confessional speech a prime mark of authenticity, par excellence the kind of speech in which the individual authenticates his inner truth’. Confession has become a generalized condition of media and public life.

8. In this context, it is also useful to observe the advent and significance of truth-seeking in so-called ‘truth commissions’ as

a means of dealing with a legacy of mass abuse following political transition to democracy or the end of violent conflict. The place that ‘truth’ assumes within the transitional justice framework has often been subject to controversy. What seems to be commonly agreed upon is that creating the conditions for finding and revealing the truth is essential in any process of transition. (Valiñas & Vanspauwen, 2009, p. 269)

9. In Language, Truth and Logic A.J. Ayer (1936) introduced the ideas of the logical positivists, sometimes referred to as the ‘Vienna Circle’ (that included the young Wittgenstein) to the English-speaking world. Ayer and the Vienna Circle were talking about fact-stating scientific discourse and held that the meaning of a sentence was its method of verification. This is to say that truth is the criterion by which empirical propositions are validated. With human communication, there is a similar argument that successful communication depends on the truthfulness of intentions.

10. This is to embrace a social history of truth, e.g. see Steven Sharpin’s (1995) A Social History of Truth Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England; Peter Burke’s (2013) A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot.

11. See https://www.ontology.co/aletheia.htm. See also Woleński’s (2004) ‘Aletheia in Greek thought until Aristotle’.

12. Homer is the legendary poet and author of the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer was born sometime between 700 and 750 BC. On some classical account, Homer is a blind poet from Asia Minor. There are some debates whether the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by one person called Homer or by a group who composed heroic hexameter verse in the manner of the oral tradition. See John Miles Foley (2007) ‘“Reading” Homer through Oral Tradition.’

13. See https://www.ontology.co/aletheia-prephilosophical.htm.

14. See Louise H. Pratt’s (1993) study of archaic notions of poetic narrative.

15. Michael S. Morre (2003) ‘The Plain Truth about Legal Truth’ distinguishes six kinds of propositions whose truth or falsity is of interest to lawyers: factual propositions, general legal propositions, interpretive propositions, propositions of value, propositions of logic, and singular legal propositions.

16. For Christians, truth is based on history, revelation, and testimony from the Bible; in Hinduism, truthfulness is the ninth of the ten attributes of dharma; in Jainism, there is only one truth that only enlighten beings can know; in Judaism, truth is the revealed truth of God; in Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths are the basic teachings.

17. See for example Ke qian Xu (2010) Chinese ‘Dao’ and Western ‘Truth’: A Comparative and Dynamic Perspective; Mark Dejong (2011) The Dao, the Truth, and the Life: Jesus and Laozi in Ethical Dialog, https://hereticalrhetoric.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/the-dao-the-truth-and-the-life-jesus-and-laozi-in-ethical-dialog/.

18. The Four Noble Truths, The Foundation of Buddhist Thought, Volume 1, Geshe Tashi Tsering, Foreword by Lama Zopa Rinpocheed, edited by Gordon McDougall, 2005, http://www.wisdompubs.org/sites/default/files/preview/Four%20Noble%20Truths%20Book%20Preview.pdf.

19. Avicenna or Ibn Sīnā (980–1037) was a philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age. See Gutas (2016) ‘Ibn Sina [Avicenna].’ See also The Physics of the Healing, Books I and II. http://www.umsl.edu/~philo/People/Faculty/McGinnis%20Works/Physics%20translation/Physics-vol.1.pdf.

20. The Gospel of Truth is one of the Gnostic texts written in Greek between 140 and 180 by Valentinian Gnostics lost until the Nag Hammadi discovery in 1945, http://gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html. ‘Each one loves truth because truth is the mouth of the father. His tongue is the holy spirit. Whoever touches truth touches the mouth of the father by his tongue at the time when one will receive the holy spirit,’ http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/got-barnstone.html.

21. Augustine’s On lying and Against Lying speaks of the love of inculcating the love of truth, see http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1312.htm. See also Remo Gramigna (2013) ‘Augustine on lying: A theoretical framework for the study of types of falsehood’.

22. In Judaism, truth is the revealed word of God, see Rabbi Louis Jacobs, ‘Truth and Lies in the Jewish Tradition,’ http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/truth-and-lies-in-the-jewish-tradition/.

23. See Richard Firth Green (1998) A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England. Green argues there is a transformation from ‘an ethical truth in which truth is understood to reside in persons transforms … into a political truth in which truth is understood to reside in documents,’ (Fowler, Elizabeth (2003). ‘Rev. of Green, A Crisis of Truth’. Speculum. 78 (1): 179–82). Whereas truth (the ‘trouthe’ of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) was first ‘an ethical truth in which truth is understood to reside in persons’, in Ricardian England, it ‘transforms … into a political truth in which truth is understood to reside in documents’ (Pearsall, Derek (2004). ‘Medieval Literature and Historical Enquiry’. Modern Language Review. 99 (4): xxxi–xlii, cited in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Changing_concepts_of_truth_in_the_Middle_Ages).

24. See Look (2017), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/#TruReaTruFac. See also Muhit (2010–11) ‘Leibniz on Necessary and Contingent Truths’ who references In a Letter to Arnauld (July 14, 1686):

Always in every true affirmative proposition, whether necessary or contingent, universal or particular, the notion of the predicate in some way included in that of the subject. Predicatum incest subjecto; otherwise I do not know what truth is. (Loemker, 1970, p. 337)

Leibniz is justly famous for his Principle of contradiction or of identity and the Principle of sufficient reason, part of his Monadology. In §33 of the Monadology, Leibniz writes:

There are two kinds of truths, those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reason are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible. When a truth is necessary, its reason can be found by analysis, resolving it into simpler ideas and simpler truths until we reach the primitives. (Ariew & Garber, 1989, p. 217)

25. Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was instrumental in initiating a new approach in philosophy of science that turned away from logical positivism and ‘development-by-accumulation’ to incommensurability and an approach based on radical conceptual discontinuity, although later scholars rediscovered striking parallels between Kuhn and early accounts of logical positivism, especially with Carnap, see Michael Friedman (2012) ‘Kuhn and Philosophy’. The historicization of epistemology in the twentieth century has been taken as a fundamental point of transformation such that there is no longer a conception of the ‘unity of science’ portrayed by logical empiricism (Rheinberger, 2010); indeed, no a priori model of science, language, or epistemology (Kitcher, 1992, p. 76)—an observation increasingly applied to Popper’s logical orientation to the problem of scientific development (Zammito, 2011). See also Fuller (2001). After Kuhn came a range of new cultural and historical studies of science: sociology of scientific knowledge, studies of laboratory life, feminist philosophy of science, structuralist and poststructuralist accounts drawing on French historical epistemology of Bachelard, and Badiou’s history of concepts as the means of production of scientific knowledge. One major debate is that between realists (Sellars, Smart and Putnam) who hold a traditional view of science based on the correspondence theory of truth and anti-realists (Feyerabend, Laudan, van Frassen) who want to overthrow this view on the basis of social construction or pragmatism based on the community of inquiry (under the influence of Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Peirce).

26. See Foucault (2000, 2001, 2014). Foucault writes: ‘My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity’. He expands this idea into the following point: ‘What I wanted to analyze was how the truth-teller’s role was variously problematized in Greek philosophy. And what I wanted to show you was that of Greek philosophy has raised the question of truth from the point of view of the criteria for true statements and sound reasoning, this same Greek philosophy has also raised the problem of truth from the point of view of truth-telling as an activity’, (65/66), ‘Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia’, given at Berkeley during the months of October-November in 1983, http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/. Foucault’s statement here stands in marked contrast to many analytic philosophers who hold Foucault (rather than Trump) responsible for the ‘decline of truth’. See, for instance, Greg Weiner (2017) ‘Trump and Truth’.

27. Foucault (2001) Fearless Speech, pp. 19–20.

28. See Ichikawa, Jenkins and Matthias (2017).

29. See https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016.

30. See https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21706525-politicians-have-always-lied-does-it-matter-if-they-leave-truth-behind-entirely-art.

31. See Glen Kessler, Michelle Yes Hee Lee and Meg Kelly (2017) ‘President Trump’s list of false and misleading claims tops 1,000’, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/08/22/president-trumps-list-of-false-and-misleading-claims-tops-1000/?utm_term=.890fee3c6ded.

32. Education and Philosophy in a Post-Truth World (eds.) Michael A. Peters, Sharon Rider and Tina Besley, Springer, 2017.

33. See Groshek and Koc-Michalska (2017) ‘Helping populism win? Social media use, filter bubbles, and support for populist presidential candidates in the 2016 US election campaign.’

34. E.g. James Carson (2017) ‘What is fake news? Its origins and how it grew in 2016,’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/fake-news-origins-grew-2016/.

35. George Orwell’s 1984 was first published in 1949. See Adam Gopnik’s (2017) ‘Orwell’s “1984” and Trump’s America,’ The New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/orwells-1984-and-trumps-america. He writes:

The blind, blatant disregard for truth is offered without even the sugar-façade of sweetness of temper or equableness or entertainment—offered not with a sheen of condescending consensus but in an ancient tone of rage, vanity, and vengeance. Trump is pure raging authoritarian id.

He goes on to say,

one is reminded of what Orwell got right about this kind of brute authoritarianism—and that was essentially that it rests on lies told so often, and so repeatedly, that fighting the lie becomes not simply more dangerous but more exhausting than repeating it. Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.

See also John Broich (2017) ‘2017 isn’t “1984”—it’s stranger than Orwell imagined’ The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/2017-isn-t-1984-it-s-stranger-than-orwell-imagined-a7555341.html.