Post-Truth
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New to Audible Prime Member exclusive: 2 credits with free trial
Post-Truth
Buy Now for ₹609.00
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Narrated by:
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Matthew Josdal
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Written by:
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Lee C. McIntyre
About this listen
What, exactly, is post-truth? Is it wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, bold-faced lying? McIntyre analyzes recent examples - claims about inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, and the popular vote - and finds that post-truth is an assertion of ideological supremacy by which its practitioners try to compel someone to believe something regardless of the evidence.
Yet post-truth didn't begin with the 2016 election; the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines, and climate change offers a road map for more widespread fact denial. Add to this the wired-in cognitive biases that make us feel that our conclusions are based on good reasoning even when they are not, the decline of traditional media and the rise of social media, and the emergence of fake news as a political tool, and we have the ideal conditions for post-truth. McIntyre also argues provocatively that the right wing borrowed from postmodernism - specifically, the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth - in its attacks on science and facts.
McIntyre argues that we can fight post-truth, and that the first step in fighting post-truth is to understand it.
©2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2018 Gildan MediaA good book for the current times..
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I listened to the audiobook version. When a book becomes the perfect embodiment of the very idea it condemns, it turns into a textbook case of intellectual tragedy. The author never pauses to ask whether the much‑abused Orwellian political jargon term he champions is even necessary, given that we already have dozens of words to express the same ideas it now supposedly covers. His examples are drawn almost exclusively from right‑wing politics—no surprise, then, that “post‑truth” has become a buzzword mainly used by left‑wing intellectuals to turn the tables on right‑wing politicians. It seems the left now survives on a diet of neologisms.
The author laments that climate change deniers are given equal footing in debates, yet never explains why there should be no debate at all. The so‑called liberals, in his telling, come across as every bit as obscurantist as the religious fundamentalists they oppose.
When discussing the media, he remains silent on the glaring biases of Western outlets like the BBC, which has, at times, reported outright falsehoods and made climate change claims that later collapsed under scrutiny. By the very definition of “post‑truth” presented in the book, communism could be considered a grand historical example—yet the author never ventures into that territory.
In the end, the book feels entirely expendable.
Quite Expendible
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