For centuries, philosophers have sought to answer the question, “What is truth?”  Now we know.  Thanks to Canada’s annual Truth and Reconciliation holiday and the online Truth Social network, truth is whatever the Canadian Aboriginal lobby and Donald Trump say it is. 

Seriously, the last couple of decades have seen capital-T Truth transformed from abstract ideal to ideological rhetoric.  In the same way that the definition of justice has been stretched to mean any desired outcome or perceived entitlement (not just universal fairness), so the definition of truth now encompasses any approved story or preferred interpretation (not just objective reality).  Truth’s opposite was once merely non-truth; now its opposites are termed denial, skepticism, and conspiracy theory.  In a variety of contexts, the word has been invoked as a pre-emptive argument, whereby particular claims are essentially patented as “true” without the defence or corroboration that truth has traditionally required.  As it’s used by self-interested groups across the political spectrum today, Truth is not a synonym for “accurate” but “must not be disputed.”

In some specialized situations, of course, older understandings still obtain.  Untrue legal testimony, i.e. perjury, is still an indictable offence, while businesses can still be held legally accountable for false advertising.  Breaches of contract, or forging a signature on a document, remain verifiable untruths that carry enforceable penalties, just as charges of libel and slander – the utterance of untrue statements about another individual – are still tried in real courts under real laws.  Designers and builders want structures to be properly balanced, or true, while navigators and ballistics experts want their tracks or trajectories to be straight and true.  Countless courtships and pop songs have venerated the principle of being true, or romantically faithful. 

But elsewhere, truth is not a neutral standard on which everyone agrees but just another topic that polarizes public opinion.  Since the beginning of this century, truth – or something labeled as such – has been seized as the definitive clincher in otherwise unresolved debates:  the online journal Truthout was founded in 2001, with a mission to deliver what it promised to be “independent reporting and commentary on a diverse range of social justice issues.”   Assertions of Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction from the George W. Bush administration, a pretext for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, led to comedian Steven Colbert’s satirical neologism “truthiness,” meaning firmly held beliefs or hunches that nonetheless lack any real evidence.  By then the allegations of “Truthers” (about the real perpetrators of 9/11) and “Birthers” (about Barack Obama’s real origins) were already rampant on the internet and the new platforms of social media, and themselves generated a corresponding number of indignant rebuttals. 

From that time, a library of websites, books, and articles aimed at exposing flat-out lies and fixing unassailable truths has grown around us.  The rise of Donald Trump from joke candidate to American president was certainly a catalyst for this, given the many demonstrably false statements attributed to him and his supporters, but the truth industry had many raw materials to draw on.  Charles P. Pierce’s Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (2010), Brooke Gladstone’s The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination On Moral Panic In Our Time and Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire (both 2017), and Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth:  Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump and Kevin Young’s Bunk:  The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-facts, and Fake News (both 2018) told histories of supposed popular credulity, and a raft of other titles and subtitles like The Truth About Crypto, The Truth About Denial, The Truth About Men, Truth Has a Power of Its Own, The Truth About Trudeau, The Truth About Mike Pence, The Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All, The Truth About White Supremacy, Our Role In It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It, and The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth About America’s “Deep State” suggest the commercial power of the word itself on a front page or headline.  In 2017 the cover of Time magazine bluntly asked “Is Truth Dead?” in a font alluding to its famous “Is God Dead?” issue of 1966. 

There is no question that our modern information avalanche, or what I have called a “cacophonocracy,” has made identifying truth an urgent project.  Politicians lie shamelessly.  Governments and corporations dissemble in order to win support and diminish that of their rivals.  Bad actors with malign intentions are, indeed, knowingly passing off fabricated information as truthful.  Photoshopped images, deepfake videos, misleading clickbait links, and the output of Russian troll farms clog our airwaves and bandwidths; the sheer volume of material every minute coming over the screens to which we are every minute attached leaves us especially ill-equipped to properly vet any of it for authenticity.  Yet a secondary problem has arisen from this, insofar as the vetting gets applied not just to particular manipulated pictures or texts but to much broader contentions that can never be absolutely discredited.   

Across our discourse, examples abound.  It’s true that the United States became an independent nation in 1776, for instance, but it’s also true that African slaves were first brought to the colonies that became the United States in 1619.  Which year marks the origin of the country as it exists today is something to discuss, not something to prove or disprove.  Meanwhile, in his 2022 book Conspiracy:  Why the Rational Believe the Irrational the social scientist Michael Shermer has described what he calls  “proxy” conspiracy theories, the belief in nonexistent plots that are nonetheless grounded in reasonable skepticism about actually existing conditions, in which “the truth of the deeper underlying conspiracy theory trump[s] the countervailing facts of the obviously false proximate conspiracy theory.”  Thus, it may be easy to show that there’s no data to support a single fringe position (about the dangers of COVID vaccines, say), but it’s harder to comprehensively refute the general outlook that gives rise to it (justified suspicion of Big Pharma).  Truth and lies, in other words, are not always as straightforward as a deepfaked video.  

And just as private organizations can corral a form of “truth” for their own official purposes, they can also describe whatever stands beyond it as “disinformation.”  Before, we had the Holocaust denial of David Irving and his ilk, who rejected voluminous scholarship for selective evidence and personal obsessions; they were explicitly denying the reality of a distinct, documented occurrence.  Now we hear of climate change denial, vaccine denial, systemic racism denial, gender dysphoria denial, and other labels, as though any contrary reading of complex history, medicine, or science is a sort of secular heresy.  Are some deniers really out to fool their audiences with consciously untrue assertions?  Sure.  Turkey denied its genocide of the Armenians.  Tobacco companies denied that cigarettes cause cancer.  But what’s often pathologized as denial is more likely to be sincere doubt or critical reasoning, meant not to ignore evidence but to engage with it.   The purported denial isn’t the problem, so much as the bids to shut it down altogether.   

We can see this complication in other real-world issues, whereby one or another side takes ownership of truth as a talisman, or a trademark, so that any opinion outside its parameters is automatically categorized as deceit.  Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine the legacy of the country’s Native Residential School system has since led to the proposal that any suggestion the system was not wholly harmful to Native children be criminalized.  “If you deny the whole residential school system and its impact on Indigenous people and the trauma that was created from those schools and the deaths,” declared lawyer Eleanore Sunchild, “then, of course, it should be seen as hate speech.”  Not inquiry, not research, not the pursuit of understanding, but hate.  At another end of the spectrum, US President Donald Trump launched his Truth Social media app in 2022 with a promise that the platform would be, in the words of its head Devin Nunes, “the opposite of some Silicon Valley tech oligarch freak telling people what they want to think.”  Okay, so does that mean that everything on Truth Social – and everything uttered by its founder – is guaranteed for integrity and good faith?  In these situations, truth is determined not by claim and counter-claim, but by whether the claims come from allies or enemies.

Connor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic has reminded, “[M]y early confidence in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and my willingness to urge others to get vaccinated was inextricably tied to my confidence that all relevant information, including dissenting perspectives, was making its way into public discourse where countless people could interrogate it, rather than being suppressed by public or private actors with unknown motives…As a general matter, no person or group or office is capable of assessing what facts or viewpoints constitute misinformation so reliably as to justify censorship based on their conclusions.”  And in his 2021 book The Constitution of Knowledge:  A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch pointed out that the genuine quest for truth means “no one gets the last word” – there’s always room for one more hypothesis, even if it’s just quickly debunked.  Rauch added, “[I]n a land of free, independent-minded people, norm-policing backfires against the norm police.  The policed may go mute in public, but resentment builds up in their hearts and homes, then bursts forth in the voting booth when activated by a demagogue.”  

So the problem with staking out truth as a partisan property is that those who supposedly don’t speak it end up going underground to express it as freely as they want – an epistemological equivalent, perhaps, of Prohibition or the War on Drugs.  Outlawing alcohol or marijuana didn’t stop people from using them; it merely forced them to produce, market, and take the products illegally, often with only the brutal hand of organized crime controlling the entire industry and sometimes distributing toxic knockoffs of substances that an authorized trade would have rendered unprofitable (people are less likely to make bathtub gin if they can buy a nice bottle of Gibson’s at the liquor store).  Likewise, telling audiences that only one set version of truth is acceptable makes the unacceptable varieties – from the merely contentious to the deliberately inflammatory – all the more intriguing.  Repeated too often, patronizing dismissals of someone else’s ideas will themselves sound suspicious.  No proposition is so erroneous it can’t be effectively contested, and no veracity should be so obvious that we can’t  succinctly show why.  Anything else isn’t truth or falsehood, but part of the vast category that’s neither fully one nor the other.