The Truth Will Set You Free
Wherein our protagonist rejects a post-truth world
It’s a common headline lately, it seems. “We Live in a Post-Truth World.”. Some people say it with fear, some people with a rather disturbing amount of glee. The truth, though, is both more complicated and a great deal simpler than we think it is.
See, we don’t live in a post-truth world at all. We live in the same world we’ve always lived in and the truth is still there waiting for you to start searching for you. The truth doesn’t give two shits whether or not you believe in it, it simply is. That’s the simple part.
The complicated part? It’s harder now than ever before to find the truth. Why? Trust.
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Trust and Media
A Gallup poll conducted in September 2024 showed that in the US, only 31% of people trusted mainstream media “A great deal” or “A fair amount”. When this was measured in the 1970’s, the trust levels ranged from 68% to 72%, so its safe to say this has dropped significantly. Worse, the same poll shows the number of people who say they have “no trust” in media in September 2024 was 36%, the third year in a row where the people with no trust outnumber those with significant trust.1
This same poll reports that media is now considered the least trustworthy institution in American democracy. The least trustworthy. Consider what that means for a minute, we’re talking about both the senate and the house which are filled with people that everyone routinely knows are lying to them, that are full of career politicians, and yet the media is considered less trustworthy.
Why? It never used to be this way.
Part of this is the media’s fault. There was a moment, somewhere along the transition to the 24 hour news cycle full of flashing screens and breaking news when networks could have chosen to take the high-road. They didn’t. Instead they pandered to outrage in a fight for ratings, they presented opinion and shouting heads as news, and they slowly eroded away at the trust that people held for them. This isn’t a partisan thing either; many people will immediately think of Fox News when thinking of this (and with good reason), but this problem crossed the aisle. Every time someone nudged the line of the truth for the “greater good”, whether it was a host on Fox News pretending there was a War on Christmas, or a Michael Moore documentary that was a little fast and loose with its camera framing to imply things that weren’t exactly true. It’s easy to justify it when you believe you’re on the side of the angels, but what this amounted to was the beginning of a War on Truth. Results mattered more, ratings mattered more, getting the outcome desired mattered more, and truth was forgotten.
What was next? Well, a lot of people like to complain about how things were ruined by “participation trophies” and “everyone is a winner” attitudes. The self esteem movement. Sadly its the people most likely to make those complaints that are responsible for a far worse problem - the participation trophy of intellectualism, as it were. The idea that “All opinions matter.”
All Opinions Matter
I believe it likely began with the phrase “Everyone has the right to an opinion”. We’ve all heard that at some point, and it’s true. We all have brains, we all have the right to make up our own minds.
Somewhere along the line though, the meaning started to change, and people started to think “All opinions are equally important”. If everyone has a right to an opinion, then no opinion is better than any other right? My opinion is as good as that guy’s and I have every right to it.
This coincided nicely with a growing distrust of institutions, such as media, and in experts in general, and the rise of social media, which not only facilitated the sharing of opinions but positively rewarded you for it! The more engagement, the more outrageous, the more controversial the better. Somewhere along the line, people started exhorting others to “do their own research”.
The trouble is, all opinions aren’t equal. If you think about it a moment, you know this to be true. It might not be pleasant, and probably not politically correct, but it’s true. There are idiots out there. You know some, you’ve met some, you’re likely related to a couple. They have opinions too.
The bottom line, really simply put, is that someone who spends their life studying something likely has better opinions about it than someone who hasn’t. It’s true that there have been cases in history when the “establishment” has been wrong, and a bold outsider has changed the world with their clear thinking. People love to amplify those little pieces of history, imagining themselves as Gallileo or Copernicus, persecuted for seeing clearly. As Florence Nightingale, trying to convince the world to wash their hands. The sad truth is that we know their names because there were relatively few of them; what of the billions of others who lived and died? The law of averages suggests you aren’t Gallileo, with ideas simply too radical for the establishment to accept, it’s far more likely you have misunderstood something.
Researching is a skill. It doesn’t mean watching youtube videos that feel good to you and nodding because it all suddenly makes sense, it means careful consideration of alternatives, carrying out experiments yourself when you are able, critically evaluating the experiments of others when you aren’t. It’s not glamourous and you don’t get to feel like a rebel while doing it, it’s painstaking, laborious. It can be fun, but its work. Sadly it rarely involves youtubers (or Truthers, or InfoWarriors) telling you what “The Establishment Doesn’t Want You To Hear”. If you walk away from the politics and look purely at the scientists, the research scientists who aren’t funded by special interest groups or pushing a specific agenda; they’re mostly just looking for the truth, same as us. There’s nothing they “don’t want you to hear” simply because it conflicts with their beliefs. A real scientists is always looking for things that conflict with their beliefs, because that is how you make discoveries, find the truth, change the world and win Nobel prizes. Nobody discovered anything by refusing to challenge their own assumptions, or by restricting themselves to ideas they already agree with.
There’s two problems that have led us to this point. Media we don’t feel we can trust and a growing number of people with confidence in their opinions who have never been taught about the power of the Dunning-Kruger effect.2 It needed something else to create this post-truth world though, these two things weren’t enough. This one is far more sinister.
Powerful People Want it This Way
This is the biggest problem in the world right now. Not the post-truth nature, not people who think they’re smarter than they are, not even arguments over culture, political correctness and wokeness. The problem is that none of this has happened by accident, and there are a lot of powerful, vested interests who are perfectly happy with how its turned out.
You wanted a conspiracy theory? You didn’t need QAnon and PizzaGate, the call has been coming from inside the house all along.
Lets take a look at a few things that have happened just in the last few months.
Within a few weeks of the new administration taking office, we started to see headlines about disappearing data.3 All through the government, the new appointees were slash and burning their way through government websites and databases, taking down pages, making changes, and deleting scientific datasets that are regularly made available by the U.S. government. Even before the DOGE department bonfire and funding slashes, the work had begun.
What was disappearing? Some of it was DEI related, as ramped up and continued very publically a while later. There was more though. A lot of scientific data, databases full of climate measurements, statistical datasets full of demographic data, vaccine research information. Not just websites explaining science and census information for the public, but the actual raw data itself that is used by scientists all over the country to look at how society is progressing, how the world is changing. Deleted and gone. (Much of it was saved luckily by scientists who suspected what was coming, but likely not all).
To understand why, we can look at more recent news. Ed Martin, current interim United States Attorney for the District of Columbia has recently taken to threatening people. A raft of letters went out from his office to scientific journals, well known and prestigious journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, considered some of the best in their field. These letters accused the journals of being “partisan in various scientific debates.” No specific issues that could be addressed were included, no examples of where these journals had errored, just vaguely worded and threatening accusations.
Journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine have well documented peer review processes and are quite transparent about how they select papers for publication, there is no great secret there. They are also protected by the first amendment, just as newspapers and private citizens are.
Martin hasn’t stopped there however, he has also now threatened the revokation of Wikipedia’s “non-profit” status, claiming it “allows foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda”. Wikipedia has well established guidelines for content and documented processes for contesting information added; despite its “anyone can edit this” outward appearance there are hundreds of thousands of editors making and reviewing changes every day.4
This is part of a broader attack on Wikipedia recently, with luminaries like Elon Musk calling on his followers to stop donating to “wokepedia”, and the paragons of empathy over at the Heritage Foundation preparing a detailed plan on how they plan or directly targeting Wikipedia editors in an effort to scare them into ceasing their activity.
Back to government departments again and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who reportedly lost quite a few datasets in the purge mentioned earlier, isn’t creating the reports it usually does. Each year, NOAA publicises the annual global greenhouse gas index, and fills its website with articles explaining the changes, what is likely causing them, what’s going well, what isn’t. Some of these reports were prepared as usual this year but we wont see them. Even before much of the funding and employees of the department were cut by DOGE, leaders within the department were making the call not to publish reports to the public that the administration weren’t going to like.5
The pattern here is orchestrated and very clear. Censorship, book banning, suppression of research, removal of data.
That last is very telling, they can claim “partisanship” and “bias” when complaining about journals, or newspapers, or wikipedia, but the datasets? That is pure information and they want it gone.
It’s clear why. Climate data that clearly shows upcoming problems, conflicting with the “manmade climate change isn’t real” messaging. Census data that clearly shows that areas with high levels of immigrants don’t actually have any higher crime rate than any other area. Anything at all that points to marginalisation of black people, women, LGBT people, or people with disabilities.
When RFK Jr. shouts that he’s going to sue research journals because they haven’t been publishing research showing the theories he believes, it’s telling. The problem is what RFK Jr. believes is wrong, and we’ve known that for decades. This isn’t a case of “needs more study”, there have been hundreds of studies on the safety of vaccines and the efficacy of same. They have been in wide use for many decades and the effects have been widely shown in the general population, not only in small or large scale studies.
A scientist, when all the evidence points to his theory being wrong, discards the theory and works on a new one. What we are seeing here is a widescale discarding of the truth in order to fit an opinion that pleases them better.
Of course there will be consequences to wide spread application of this particular philosophy. Lets take a look at some of them.
Where has this led us?
In 2024, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increase by 3.75ppm. In recent decades the annual increase has averaged between 1 and 2ppm per year, meaning that 2024 was almost twice the usual increase. There are various reasons for this, some less worrying (rebound from covid-era drops), some much more worrying (potential increase due to AI power requirements). Which is the case is hard to say unfortunately, particularly with some of the agencies best positioned to analyse this afraid to do so.6
On the topic of pollution, locals in Memphis; a group very familiar with suffering under poor air quality; are calling for xAI’s planning permits to be denied and for them to shut down their already-running gas turbines at the new supercomputer facility they have built “faster than anyone has ever built anything like this before.”. In order to do that, apparently, they cut a few corners and make a few misstatements - such as stating in the planning request that they would be running 15 gas turbines. Recent investigations by local Memphis environment groups have revealed they are currently running at least twice that many, without oversight, regulation or permission. Indeed this may have jumped xAI into pole position for largest producer of smog pollution in the area. Local residents have increased asthma, respiratory illness and potentially cancer to look forward to, should they be correct about the turbines (and the evidence suggests they are.)
Down to Texas now and we have an incredible measles outbreak. Across the country the number of cases has already surpassed 900; already exceeding the total number of full-year cases of any year in the last two decades. CDC, prior to having its website gutted and vaccine information stripped from it, estimated that a national vaccine uptake of 95% was required in order to prevent measles spreading through the country and retain the “eliminated” status that the country first obtained in 2000, the first year the U.S. went 12 months without continuous transmission. The U.S. dropped to 95% in 2019. In the 2023/24 school season it had dropped to 92.7%7
The efficacy and safety of vaccines, particularly the MMR vaccine, has been widely studied, well tested and has been a settled question in scientific circles for decades. Despite this, the anti-vax movement is loud and social media has amplified their reach. The result? Measles is sweeping through close knit, unvaccinated communities, particularly in Texas which has seen 2/3rds of the cases.
The result? 900+ cases across the country, 600+ in Texas along with 64 hospitalisations. The last time there was a death from measles in the U.S. was a decade ago in 2015, when an already immunocompromised adult was unlucky enough to catch it. The last time a child died from measles in the U.S. was 2003.
This year, three children have died already.
Whatever else you may have thought about the science and scientists, look at the costs of stubborn, uninformed opinions. It’s easy to claim vaccines aren’t needed after they have been in place for decades, and dead children are a thing of the past. When you can refrain from vaccination and still be protected by herd immunity, despite working to undermine it. Eventually when the numbers of unvaccinated grow too high, this is where we are. Stepping backwards into tragedy.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
What do we do?
Reject the post-truth world. Reject it with every fiber of your being. It doesn’t matter if you’re a conservative, a liberal or something in between, you are a person and a member of our global community - you deserve a world based on honesty and truth, where our children can be safe and our interests looked after, not sold down the river while we’re distracted by clickbait and outrage.
You don’t trust the media? Hard to blame you. It’s playing the outrage game as well. See this amusing satirical piece from the Daily Show on the recent stock market crashes and Fox News response (or lack of it) for an example of how this is being done:
We need to progress though. We need something better than the hateful, social media driven, culture war that are being fed to us as a truth replacement. Here are some ideas on how we can all work to end the Post-Truth age and get back to something more real
Education. There’s a reason that the current administration is slashing funding; an educated populace isn’t good news for people relying on you to stay angry and feuding with each other. We can’t rely on the government turning that around anytime soon so work to educate yourself. The most important things to learn:
Science literacy; how the scientific method really works, how peer review works, what differentiates a good study aimed at finding the truth from a purchased studied whose outcome was decided before it began.
Research; do your own research isn’t a bad catch-cry, but you need to learn how to do it. How to assess critically, what good and bad science and opinion looks like. What cognitive bias are and how they can affect how you think - you can’t always beat them, but you can be aware of them. Learn how to map an argument and weigh up the evidence on both sides, to see which is really more compelling. Learn about Occams razor and the law of averages.
Platform Reform. This is crucial, as the social media platforms we love are amplifying this problem hard by incentivising the wrong behaviour (from our point of view). Some possible changes:
Remove engagement metrics. Incentivise accuracy over engagement. Research has shown the current engagement algorithms lead some people to propogate even information they themselves don’t believe, in constant search of likes, reshares and engagement dopamine. Modelling also shows that when accuracy is incentivised over engagement, sharing of misinformation drops to extremely low levels.
Amplify credible sources. Some media can’t be trusted, but there are many organisations, media and otherwise, who prioritise truth and transparency in how they report and analyse. Our systems can easily amplify and prioritise known sources of truth over potential misinformation peddlers.
Disclose the algorithm. Social media “commercial secrets” are not more important than the safety of users and the safety of our society. Make the details of the algorithm public and available for inspection.
It’s safe to say the big tech companies are not going to be willing to make any of these changes, as they have commercial reasons for liking things just the way they are. It’s up to us to press for regulation that puts our wellbeing ahead of their profits.
Fact Checking. A lot of this is caused by people unwillingness to trust. Caution and distrust can be smart, but we need to distrust smart. Consider the following:
Find trustworthy sources and use them as a barometer. It can be hard to determine who is trustworthy, so consider what they do, and what reasons they have for doing it. If they constantly push your outrage buttons, keeping you glued to the screen while quietly advertising “health” supplements in the background, maybe they’re less credible.
Distrust the right things. Any time someone tells you something that fits perfectly with your beliefs, distrust it. Any time you really want to believe what you’re being told, distrust it. Anything that outrages you or evokes a strong emotional reaction, distrust it. This doesn’t mean its not true, it means investigate further. Don’t accept it because you want it to be true, or because it feels true - that’s the danger of confirmation bias sounding its alarm in your ear. Check, and check again. Find multiple sources that aren’t just all linking to each other. Check facts yourself. Remember, if the man who fired shots during PizzaGate had checked, he could have discovered there was no basement in that building and known the whole affair was someone’s sick idea of fun.
Anything that seems to good to be true, is.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Occams razor - the simplest explanation that fits all the facts is usually the correct one.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is an important one. Conspiracies can be real, just because it’s not widely believed doesn’t necessarily mean its true. Look at Weinstein and Epstein and what they got away with for decades. If someone is making a wild claim though, they need extraordinary evidence. Don’t just take peoples word for it. If they provide evidence, evaluate it. If an anti-vaxer talks about Andrew Wakefield, which many still do, it doesn’t take a lot of research to find the papers he published. It wont take much more to find out they were retracted by the journal that published them when other scientists could not replicate the findings, when it was discovered he was paid by interested parties to come up with the findings he did. It wont take long to discover the problems that were found in his research, and how it lead to him being struck off the medical register and thrown out of the medical association for his conduct.
Talk to each other. Not shout, not preach, just talk. Ask questions. The people around you, even the ones you don’t agree with, every one of them knows something you don’t, and that something might be a piece of the puzzle you need. Sometimes the things we find “unbelievable” just need more context.
The is a war of information on, but it’s not republicans versus democrats, liberals versus conservatives. It’s not the south versus the north, the working class versus coastal elites or citizens versus immigrants. It’s not even really the west versus China and Russia, though Russia’s disinformation progams certainly don’t help us. It’s the billionaires and the corporations against the rest of us. When productivity and profits have increased hundredfold over the last decades but wages remained stagnant, buying power has reduced, real poverty has increased and opportunity decreased. When the corporations pay no tax on billions in profit and we struggle to feed our families and house ownership is a pipe-dream for the next generation, we need to stop fighting each other and look at where the real problem is and demand a change.
Thanks for bearing with me through this rant at the state of things. Next week we’ll get back to our usual topics of art, tech and the magic of self expression.
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Inc, Gallup. “Americans’ Trust in Media Remains at Trend Low.” Gallup.com, October 14, 2024. https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-remains-trend-low.aspx.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
“Disappearing Data: Trump Administration Removing Climate Information from Government Websites | National Security Archive.” Accessed April 26, 2025. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/climate-change-transparency-project-foia/2025-02-06/disappearing-data-trump.
Roth, Emma. “Trump DOJ Goon Threatens Wikipedia.” The Verge, April 25, 2025. https://www.theverge.com/news/656720/ed-martin-dc-attorney-wikipedia-nonprofit-threat.
Berwyn, Bob. “A Grim Signal: Atmospheric CO2 Soared in 2024.” Ars Technica, April 25, 2025. https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/a-grim-signal-atmospheric-co2-soared-in-2024/.
Berwyn, Bob. “A Grim Signal: Atmospheric CO2 Soared in 2024.” Ars Technica, April 25, 2025. https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/a-grim-signal-atmospheric-co2-soared-in-2024/.
Mole, Beth. “With over 900 US Measles Cases so Far This Year, Things Are Looking Bleak.” Ars Technica, April 25, 2025. https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/04/this-is-shaping-up-to-be-the-worst-year-for-us-measles-cases-since-the-1990s/.