But if there was one thing you never were, it was full of shit. You spoke your mind every minute of every day, sometimes down to the second, utterly heedless of consequence. Amazingly..., whether due to environment or heredity, I picked up this behavior, and when I did it, you would act as though the world had ended.
People say we're now living in a post-truth age. That's a load of shit in itself. We've been living in a post-truth age at least since my adolescence. Bill Clinton based a whole career on composting truth into law-evading bullshit, and Republicans of the 90s with their accusations about 'liberal media' declared an outright war on truth.
I'm sure we could date the post-truth age much further back. The snake in the Garden of Eden was probably just a guy with a broken leg. But you warned me all the time: history is not the truth. The moment an event becomes history, the moment people become history, they are only seen through the filter of what people want to remember about them, so there is no history without an extraordinarily fungible relationship to the truth. Truth is something so easily abused, so easily manipulated, so easily coopted for propaganda that what does it even mean to tell it?
But yes, it has accelerated in recent years exponentially, and there is no better evidence for how the truth has been obscured than how fervently people believe in their vision of the truth. That's what propaganda does. The truth itself is not all that important until it goes missing, but you can tell it's gone missing because people start believing in the importance of truth much much more than they used to. Truth requires no passion, faith requires infinite passion. The more fervently people believe in their vision of truth, the less convincing they are about it to anyone who doesn't already believe them. The more people insist they speak the truth, the more suspect they should be of telling lies.
Truth goes away, truth reappears, but not first without the consequences of its disappearance. Lies are always present in worldwide discourse. You taught me that much, but I don't think I ever got a straight answer from you about whether you thought history was progressing toward any greater wisdom. I can't imagine you'd say yes, with your cynicism that made Billy Wilder look as earnest as Aaron Sorkin, but you had moments of surprise where you could pull a hopeful sentiment out of your ass: I wonder if it was just to keep us guessing, but whatever your mood was in the moment. I think you meant it, but it would just change from hour to hour as we all tried to ride the waves of your moods (and mine). But ultimately, I have to imagine you'd agree that all wisdom is temporary and eventually will be lost. The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards itself. Eventually, every lesson is forgotten. I'm sure some people would call that pessimistic, but I just call it life. Everything dies, even wisdom and knowledge even as new forms of it are birthed.
When I was growing up, the truth was generally something accepted and not particularly disputed. It was disputed in the Soviet Union, but we all knew that what was told over there was lies: Soviet citizens were very particular about that in my youth. The only place where the truth was truly disputed was on the American right, where, apparently, every corner of media not them was riddled with as many holes of bias as Swiss cheese.
One of the telltale signs of a movement based more on faith than truth is their fixation on media bias. There is no such thing as 'media', there are many medias (moreso than ever today), many of which strive however imperfectly to ascertain the truth, and many of which strive, however imperfectly, to obscure it. The most reliable manner of knowing just how much they mean to obscure the truth is how much time is devoted to opinion rather than fact, and within the space devoted to opinion, how much is devoted to the same opinions regardless of who voices them. This is why I don't particularly care to watch MSNBC, but even MSNBC is much more factual than FOX where every liberal host and panelist is simply there so viewers can watch them be demolished.
The whole point of propaganda, the whole point of consuming media that conforms to your ideological orientation, the whole point of casting doubt on any media that does not proceed from your own ideological filter, is not truth but faith. The point is to believe that something is true by feeling rather than evidence. Evidence is not there to validate you or anyone else, evidence is there to ascertain the truth as best we can: we may get it wrong, but every day we get up and we try again. That's what it means to live a life of good faith.
The truth is that none of us are going to know the truth about the world, and even our best guesses to the truth are faith. But there is faith, and then there is good faith. The statistics whose veracity is disputed by so many different ideologies are collected by millions upon millions of people whose entire senses of self is gained by doing their job well. To dispute their findings is the kind of bad faith that only the faithful possess.
But it's not their fault: not when the fog of propaganda is impossible to see through from minute to minute.
I am so tired right now...
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