The Rise of Truthiness - Why You Can’t Substantiate Anything Online

Or how to live in a post-truth world

I don’t know if anyone remembers the term ‘truthiness’. Coined in 2005 by Stephen Colbert to describe certain political arguments put forward by the George W. Bush administration, primarily to do with the US invasion of Iraq, today truthiness is defined by online dictionaries as ‘the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true’.

Much argumentation we encounter online these days is truthy. The claim from a while back that Imane Khelif was secretly a man who had snuck into female boxing was truthy - multitudes of people accepted it without any examination of facts because they intuitively felt that it might be true. It was of little use to try and explain how Algeria does not recognize transness, how Khelif was born a girl and her passport shows it, to show her childhood pictures - a girl in pink pajamas with little pink earrings. None of this could win against the truthiness of the idea that the Woke Olympics have decided to let men beat up women.

The claim that Hamas beheaded 40 babies on October 7th was so truthy it got immediately repeated by the President of the United States on live tv, along with the claim that he had seen photographs of this horrific act. By the time independent assessments confirmed, reconfirmed and thrice confirmed that no baby beheading had ever happened, that there hadn’t even been 40 babies among the victims, that nobody had produced a shred of evidence of their existence - it was far too late. To this day people casually quote ‘beheaded babies’ as justification for the continued violence against Palestine. The claim was not true, but it was truthy.

Many online debates lean much more heavily on truthiness than on actual truth. If you enter any random discussion on, I don’t know, vegan vs. carnivore diet, or effectiveness vs. danger of COVID vaccines, or the driving factors of violent crime, or Trump vs. Harris, or whatever we are freaking out about today, you will see a sea of claims backed exclusively by truthiness. These are always presented with maximum confidence, unflinchingly, as solid fact. Sometimes someone will ask for a source. 

Often the source is ‘everyone knows’, ‘it is widely recognized that’, ‘common sense tells you that’….. Basically, studies conducted by Trust Me Bro University. If any source is actually provided, it will be immediately dismissed by the other side as unreliable. The other side will then provide its own source for the contrary claim, which will also be immediately dismissed by the first party, because ‘everyone knows you can’t trust THAT newspaper/ organization/ study, it’s unsubstantiated leftist/ alt-right trash’. 

So everyone is left with their own truthiness. No one ever convinces anyone of anything. Endless debates carry on with much heated argument, and everyone walks away pissed off and unconvinced. It seems absolutely impossible to actually move any discussion forward.

Beautiful wall mural I walked past near Jean Talon market in Montreal

It’s possible that this is simply the result of an excess of access to information. We cannot possibly parse everything that is available to us. The internet has brought us insight into all of human knowledge, but also all of human misguidedness, and sadly neither of the two always comes appropriately labeled. Our understanding of many subjects has reached such levels of complexity that a layperson cannot possibly hope to ‘do their own research’  and come to the right conclusions. Multiple factions will willfully or accidentally misrepresent studies or findings to support their own preconceived ideas, and parsing through all the available argumentation is often exhausting. 

So in most cases we pick certain pundits to parse the information for us, and we pick them mostly on truthiness. But once we’re locked in, it seems extremely difficult to accept we may have been misled. 

One cynical theory, however, postulates that this drive to shift from truth to truthiness is being made on purpose. That public education is being systematically eroded, that confidence in experts and educated professionals is being purposely undermined, and that people are encouraged to select their own preferred truth, ultimately rather ‘agreeing to disagree’, (or sending each other to hell), than seeking to find some objective actual answer as to who is right and who is wrong, or whether the facts may actually paint a more complex picture than either of the two opposing black-and-white views.

Why, though? What would be the purpose of eliminating the very concept of objective truth? Well, for one thing it’s an amazing propaganda tool. If you can convince people that it ultimately doesn’t even matter what the objective truth of the matter is, you can get them to defend a certain narrative to the death, regardless of any evidence to the contrary that might be presented by the other side. The sources that feed your confirmation bias are treated as ‘good and reliable’, those that present opposing data are dismissed as cheap propaganda, the Devil’s flimsy tricks trying to get you to abandon your well researched position. That’s how you push forward your chosen agenda.

But in actual fact, it is rare for any agenda to actually align with the truth. Because the truth has a nasty habit of being multilayered, multifaceted, and not entirely in support of linear progress. 

Vaccines save lives. Vaccines can also carry health risks. Overall vaccines have saved far more people than they have harmed. Vaccines have been pushed onto people with insufficient research, causing harm to certain groups. All of these statements are true. They coexist and twist together. Embracing some and discarding others gives you a stance that is truthy, rather than true.

The Democratic Party in the US supports the genocide in Gaza. The Republican Party in the US supports the genocide in Gaza. If you are generally left-leaning, you are more likely to approve of the future policies of the Democratic Party than those of the Republican Party. But the Democratic Party is extremely unlikely to budge its views on Gaza without a lot of external pressure. So essentially, if you are comfortable voting for the Democratic Party without putting on that political pressure, you are essentially accepting that the genocide in Gaza is not a deal breaker for you. 

All these things are objectively true. You can go with one truthiness or the other, but the truth still sits there, a tangled knot. If you vote Blue because you don’t want to ‘waste your vote’, you are sending a clear message that this government’s foreign policy is not unacceptable to you. If you vote third party because you cannot accept this government’s foreign policy decisions, you are possibly facilitating a Trump victory and endangering all the people in your own life whom his policies will hurt. It’s a catch 22. Have fun deciding.

Stormy sky, but not as stormy as our political climate, lol. I’m reaching, I know, but I don’t draw as fast as I write.

Most issues we are debating in the public sphere these days follow this same pattern. There are facts that lean in different directions, and they don’t necessarily win over each other. By choosing one side as the truthier and refusing to engage genuinely with the arguments of the other side, you just add to the cacophony of bickering. 

We need to start having actual healthy conversations again. 

And just to clarify - this doesn’t mean I believe you need to be patient with bigots, or racists, or fools. But I know we all have those subjects where we want the situation to be clear cut, but it just isn’t. So we kind of ignore the messy part. 

Like we can admit that the climate crisis is absolutely real but a lot of the ‘measures’ we have introduced to fight it are meaningless and fake - we need to make changes that will actually protect our environment, many of them involving control over what rich people and corporations are allowed to do, instead of being lulled into complacency by ‘recycling’ things that largely never actually get recycled. We can have an actual informed debate over the damage of fossil fuels vs. the damage of digging up cobalt and lithium for electric car batteries, and objectively consider whether either of those is a reasonable solution, and do we need other approaches, instead of just clinging onto one or the other and calling the opposing side ignorant and evil.

We can admit that it is possible to love and accept your body while also wanting to change it in some way. We can accept that exercise and sports are beneficial to us in hundreds of ways while still protecting people’s right - and need - to live in bodies of different shapes, sizes, and ability levels.

We can admit that the other side’s political representative is horrible but our side’s representative objectively isn’t that great either. We can ask ourselves the difficult questions that are so tempting to ignore - what DO I do with the things my candidate supports but I personally find abhorrent? Is it realistic to think we will be able to change their mind later if we’re not able to change their mind right now when they still need our vote? Am I just giving up on that issue and trying to minimize its importance because I want to feel safe in other areas?

We can accept that other people have other political priorities, while still expecting them to respect ours.

I watched a skit by a comedian (I forget which, remind me if you know) who said ‘I think a fetus is a baby, and abortion is killing it. But I also think a woman should absolutely have the right to do that.’ That’s the sort of messy, unnerving, but not untrue take on complex issues I want to see discussed more in the public sphere.

Let’s get back to having complex and nuanced conversations on difficult topics. I don’t want to pick one simplistic side and go ‘rah rah’. I want to learn something. Consider a different angle. Understand where the other side is coming from. Untangle the knot, or at least pick at it a little.

I will never forget when Hilary Clinton, in her race against Trump, openly called his supporters ‘a basket of deplorables’. Anyone who has ever had a political debate with a Trump supporter viscerally knows what she was referring to. And yet that comment showed in a split second how little interest she had in the serious issues that plagued - that continue to plague - a very large number of people. Towns with no jobs. Towns with no clean water. Towns plagued by violence. No health care, no child care. People running out of options. Sure, were they misguidedly blaming immigrants and trans people instead of… *checks notes* …. the government? They were. But that doesn’t make their problems any less real. Reducing them down to the cast of ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ doesn’t move the political debate forward. All it tells me is that if I stood in the way of her goals, she’d dismiss me with equal ease and disdain. Harris’s ‘I’m speaking’ moment gave me the same vibe. 

Ok this one is definitely topical, symbolic AND metaphorical.

Naomi Klein made a very interesting point about conspiracy theorists - they are usually right about something being not quite right, even if they focus on the wrong specifics. ‘Microchips in vaccines’ are laughable but beyond doubt the pharmaceutical industry isn’t beyond doing things to hurt us for profit. ‘Democrat pedophiles meeting in pizza parlors’ was weird as heck, but we did get Jeffrey Epstein, and he is insufficiently far from that particular ballpark.

(Other batshit things, of course, will just be trotted out to hurt minorities. My rule for even considering whether the newest crazy claim might be true is figuring out whom it hurts. Because they’re usually calculatedly pointed against someone. Nobody is eating your pets, but people have literally attacked their Haitian neighbors over that insane claim. Let’s not be utterly dumb.)

Then of course there are things that are just beyond parsing anymore. With too many ‘reliable sources’ touting mountains of ‘facts’ and information with supreme confidence while firmly contradicting each other. So for lots of these, I just don’t know. Is COVID still a thing? I don’t know. Was the vaccine properly researched? I took 4 of them and I still don’t know. Is anyone actually trying to make the Israel Hamas negotiations work? I don’t know. Probably not, honestly. Will the housing market really crash? I don’t know. Is recycling doing anything? Is Tylenol trying to kill me? Is the AI bubble bursting already? Should I be drinking cow milk and eating tofu? Are there dangerous doses of pesticides on all my produce? …..you guessed it. I don’t know.

I just don’t know. These are all things I have read EXTENSIVELY about. Searched for reliable sources, compared different opinions, invested time and mental energy. And I still don’t know. 

If we now live in a world where it’s perfectly normal for media to lie to us, massage their messaging, and just generally not even try to deliver the news, if we have figured out that the FDA can be bought and corporations can fudge their product safety research in the name of profit, if we have realized that all the politicians are physically incapable of saying anything they actually mean, if it’s common knowledge that the social media algorithms do not favor truth but shock value, if every scientific study can be questioned based on who actually funded it and for what purpose, as well as who interpreted its results and with what degree of scientific literacy…. Then how are we to actually know things?

It feels like the more information we’re bombarded with, the less we actually know. It also feels like this is extremely fertile ground for all sorts of manipulation. And the people who rule over us largely do so through manipulation. Coincidence? Now I sound like Alex frikkin Jones again.

The long and short of it is - I do think this is on purpose. I do think public education has been eroded - or at the very least it has not been protected from erosion - because an educated general population brings questionable benefit to the ruling class. The smartest kids will manage to claw their way to a good education anyway, and those with money have their pick of fancy private schools. (I have had the weird luck of bouncing between public and private during my education, and I can confirm the differences are stark). And everyone else - maybe it’s better if they don’t get too smart? It will take them longer to notice that most media stories make no sense. And they won’t be able to turn up their noses at all those sweet, sweet, grueling, underpaid jobs we need someone doing.

I do think the media have been gutted of their actual investigative and truth-telling power, becoming instead loudspeakers and mouthpieces for different factions of power. The rare exceptions have to constantly harass their readers for money, because without wealthy donors maybe you don’t have the muzzle and the leash, but you also don’t have a guaranteed bowl of kibble for dinner. This leaves us all in the position of having to research every single topic to death before we can have any confidence in our stance, and let’s be real, for most people this is simply not a viable option. So we remain forever unsure, which surely is exactly the point. Funny how not a single Rich Person out there seemed to find it important to protect freedom of the press.

So what do we do with all this? I don’t know, friends. For one thing, we become aware of it. We talk about it. We confess to each other that we’re not as confident as we try to project. We keep our ears open to other interpretations. We don’t tune out the second it’s not the familiar song from our favorite album. More than anything, we open our hearts and minds to the possibility that some of our own views might be in conflict with each other.

Without that, we’re in a bind. The Emperor will keep parading his/ her new clothes and we will be stuck arguing over their pattern and color.