I happened to watch the CBS program “Full Measure” on February 26, 2017.  The program made the point that almost nothing on social media can be believed.  It is manipulated and faked, including even the comments, ‘likes,’ etc.  This is done by the major social media giants, by governments, by companies, by everyone.  The claim was that much of the stuff was untrue, not just biased.

The program decried the situation, declaring that people “used to know the difference between the National Enquirer and the New York Times.”

There was no mention of the fact this is an example of evil being hoisted on its own petard.  The NYTimes never raised a voice to defeat the philosophical voices proclaiming there is no such thing as truth, that truth was a construct of “old, white men.”  These voices came first from the ivory towers of Ivy League schools, but practiced – with full support of the NYTimes  — by governments, especially starting with FDR and LBJ.  The few voices proclaiming the idea of “truth” were routinely ridiculed, marginalized by academia, by newspapers, by teachers and novelists of all sorts.

This has led to a situation where the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year is “post-truth,” as in post-truth society.  When the concept of truth is debunked and denied, how do you expect the practice of truth (of integrity) to survive?  It’s been killed, along with God, by Nietzsche and his friends last century.  Correction – longer ago than that.  That was just the cultural version of an act that happened 20 centuries ago.  Back then, a government official flippantly asked the question “What is truth?” then ordered the state execution of the embodiment of the answer.  Today, the effects of that action by Pilate have finally worked themselves out in culture.

Unfortunately, since intellectuals destroyed the handle – truth – by which to interpret the current situation of untruths, there is no way left to identify what’s happening.  Like a blind and deaf man in a burning house, they feel the heat, but cannot identify the fire.  Is it any wonder that Webster’s dictionary picked the word “surreal” as its word of the year?

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