The next four years are going to be strange, but they’re going to be strange in different ways, depending on what reality you currently inhabit.
There’s a term that’s tossed around by scholars and academics about what’s happened to our society of late, “epistemic collapse.”
This is a fancy way of saying that people no longer agree on what is true and what is not. People don’t just disagree about the meaning of things – is it good or bad that so-and-so won election, for example – they often disagree on actual events. Reality is up for grabs!
This is not a phenomenon purely of the first Trump administration, although that’s when it became most noticeable.
Conspiracy theories go back generations. You could argue that the witch burnings and pogroms and dancing manias of centuries ago were the first manifestations.
But one feature of the world, at least from the invention of the printing press onwards, was that it became easier to pin reality down. We became better able to measure, to record, and to transmit information about reality.
(This was not always a positive thing. Some historians place the blame for the centuries of religious wars between Protestants and Catholics in Europe squarely on the invention of the printing press.)
Somewhere in the late 20th century, our hold on reality started to break down.
The amount of information kept growing. Maybe there is too much of it, now? Too many radio stations, newspapers, magazines, books, pamphlets. Then the internet, and the explosion of social media. A billion points of view accessible all at once.
This situation has divided the world into two groups.
On one side are the people who still believe there is a more-or-less objective reality. One in which we can fight about the meanings of things, but at least acknowledge that what happened is what happened. Where evidence can be weighed and tested and decisions based on it.
On the other are a combination of hucksters and dupes – often the same people serve in both roles, at different times. For them, reality is malleable. The creators of these alternate realities do what they do for a variety of reasons, some for money, others for power, and many for pure mean-spirited fun.
These folks will tell you the Earth is flat, the moon landings were fake, fluoridated water is poisoning your precious bodily fluids, vaccines are killing you, and that everyone, except them of course, is lying to you.
Donald Trump, who has spread and endorsed so many of falsehoods, is not the primary cause of this. He’s just a beneficiary. An environment where lies and truth can’t be distinguished is ideal for someone who trades in exaggeration, wild rhetoric, and outright lies.
The truth is, I don’t know how to fight against unreality. Nothing tried so far has been that effective. It’s like trying to bail a sinking ship with a colander.
Still, what else can you do? Reality is real. And we’ll either remember that, or we’ll crash into it, hard.
