Ever since Plato’s allegory of the cave, the nature of truth has been a thorny issue. The early 21st century, however, has brought us the rise of the post-truth era. In the age of truth, we could debate what is true and what is not. Now, the truth seems to matter no longer. We’ve supplanted it with opinions, emotions, narratives, and outrage. The truth is either irrelevant or a matter of the sheer power to impose what is true. Is it the end of truth as we know it?

And what now? Is it helpful to redraw the development of the last decade and trace it back to its roots? Or should we look at the new rules of the game? Is there a way back? Or what’s the way forward?

There is a strong Orwellian smell and taste to the entire story. The key difference is this: Orwell’s dystopian satire still holds the truth as relevant. It has to be manipulated to control the masses. Today, truth does not end with a bang, but a whimper. An increasing number of people in our societies are no longer interested in the truth. They have their own version of it.

Is this a throwback to the time before the Enlightenment? Or is it, rather, the collapse – the end – of our current regime of truth? The French philosopher Michel Foucault coined the term in his work in the late 1970s. He suggests a certain connection between power and truth, the power of separation between truth and error.

The political economy of truth

In Foucault’s understanding, every society has discursive rules to distinguish between true and false. Truth is not independent of power. In a 1976 interview, “The political function of the intellectual”, he states:

In societies like ours the ‘political economy’ of truth is characterised by five historically important traits: ‘truth’ is centred on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions which produce it; it is subject to a constant economic and political incitation (the demand for truth, as much for economic production as for political power): it is the object, under diverse forms, of an immense diffusion and consumption (it circulates in apparatuses of education and information whose extent is relatively wide within the social body, notwithstanding certain strict limitations); it is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media … ); lastly, it is the stake of a whole political debate and social confrontation (‘ideological’ struggles).

What do these considerations, now almost five decades old, tell us, given the current situation? First of all, we can say that the internet has drastically expanded and complicated the circulation, diffusion and consumption of truth. In this process, truth has lost its singularity in favour of a multitude of parallel worlds, each of which maintains its own truths.

However, these parallel worlds are not so isolated that they do not touch each other. On the contrary, different truths are now fighting for supremacy with all discursive, economic, political and cultural means at their disposal. We could also say that different regimes of truth are competing for supremacy, leading to the end of truth as a universally accepted concept.

In his later work, Foucault introduced the dimension of subjectivity into the concept of the regime of truth. This is not to say that he foresaw the current state of affairs, which has replaced truth with deeply subjective opinions, emotions, narratives and indignation. Rather, he saw that the rules for the acceptance of truth are unavoidably the result of historical, social, cultural and ultimately political production.

An instrumental relationship to the truth

When the political system changes, so does the regime of truth. Autocracies deal with truth differently from democracies. On a global scale, we have seen a shift away from democracy toward autocratic systems. “The USA is no longer considered a democracy and lies at the cusp of autocracy,” is the verdict of the Center for Systemic Peace. There is even a word for this state of limbo: anocracy.

Autocracies cultivate an instrumental relationship to the truth. Disinformation and misinformation (similar but not the same) are common tools for them. In the USA in particular, the disseminators of disinformation and misinformation invoke the ‘freedom of speech’ protected by the constitution. The truth de facto takes a back seat.

Nina Jankowicz, who will be joining us at NEXT25 in September, was involved in these battles herself. In 2022, she was appointed to lead the Disinformation Governance Board, which was tasked with coordinating counter-disinformation policy within the Department of Homeland Security. She reports what happened next as follows:

Within hours of the board’s public launch, partisan media, influencers, and members of Congress were calling it a “Ministry of Truth” and claiming that I would be censoring Americans’ speech. They did this entirely without evidence; as demonstrated by the board’s founding documents and my five-hour sworn deposition before the House Judiciary Committee in 2023, the board had nothing to do with censorship. Its mission was to protect civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, and the First Amendment.

The Ministry of Truth is, of course, a fictional department in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, whose mission is to rewrite history. The board that was attacked in this way was dissolved shortly thereafter. Disinformation had won the battle; truth had lost.

A different kind of truth

The confusion between truth and lies is now a general pattern, reflected in the battle cry of ‘fake news’. There is, indeed, a growing number of fake news stories circulating online. At the same time, it has become common to denounce serious but unwelcome media reports as fake news.

What matters is not whether something is true or false, but whether it fits into one’s worldview and agenda. This is a different kind of truth. However, if we return to Foucault, the difference is not so fundamental. Truth is not a given. Pontius Pilate’s famous question, ‘What is truth?’, points to the difficulty of using truth as a political category.

Where there is no agreement on truth, power and majority must decide. To prevent modern societies from becoming dysfunctional, it must remain possible to revise these decisions. Otherwise, they would eventually become sclerotic. The USA, under the current presidency, is an example worth observing in this respect.