A Post-Truth Test

We now live in a time when most everyone seems to be assured they know the absolute truth concerning the world at large, and that there are legions of people around the globe who are choosing to ignore reality. This seems to affect all areas of the political spectrum equally. People ready to think critically of their own view point, or at least not feeling the need to entrench themselves and their views, are very few and far between. No one wants to betray their set of values lest they be on the losing side of whatever war we all seem to think is going on. One of the most well-known and nefarious effects of this is the idea of post-factualism as most absurdly embodied in a term like “alternative facts”. On one side, one must admit that there has never been a real “truth” era, as all powers and groups have always made up their own version of truth to strengthen their identities and groups. At the moment, however, the assault on facts is hindering any reasonable discourse. I hope to put forward a test in the form of a simple question to illustrate how one could open up an argument to unveil the absurdity of a post-truth position, and thereby hopefully disengage the power of the all-saturating doubt. The question and its answer should illustrate the need for knowledge as based on agreed facts and that all of us indeed already operate within this framework without maybe knowing it.

Question: “What is your name?”
Following the answer…
Reply: “I don’t believe you. Prove it.”

Whatever the answer is, one can steadfastly retain that you either don’t believe them or demand they must first prove to you that it is their real name. This simple question and response are meant to expose that the core ideas surrounding people’s basic concepts of their identity, what they use to identify themselves in, and in response to, the world is an aggregate, a culmination, of cultural traditions of information and knowledge as based on certain agreed facts of one kind of another. Any answer or appeal made must take place within a paradigm that is constituted out of truths that are backed by these specific facts.

More common names will have century, sometimes millennia old traditions. All those histories are reliant on common acknowledged truths of one kind or another. For a person to prove that their name is really their name, they would usually have to possess the backing of some kind of official bureaucracy that confirms their existence. This is a pretty straight-forward case for exposing the need for agreed truths. Lacking this, family witnesses would have to make due, and these could be doubted ad infinitum. Less common names will usually be rich in more recent cultural identifiers, which can be traced to contemporary lineages, but even they are backed by histories that must be agreed on or else they can be uprooted due to a perceived lack of tradition or simply thrown away as lies. Any flat-out denial shows the shortcoming of throwing out common beliefs or truths. You can’t prove that your name is really your name without having to reference cultural traditions as based in accepted realities which are, in turn, based on shared knowledge and truth, and one can’t definitively prove your name is actually your name in today’s world without reference to some type of bureaucracy. Without these elements, we lack the structures and institutions (real or imagined) for our societies and the meaning they can imbue.

Names are a prime example as people tend to associate so much with them and identify strongly with their meaning as something that defines them – steeped in the native language, referencing cultural trends, religiosity or figures associated with concepts they find inspiring. So much so that people will push to change their name if they feel it doesn’t reflect their personal history or their identity as it stands. The names they then choose are even more loaded with truth-based meaning as they have to go back and access the vast library of context and interpretation within names and their understandings of them to find one that reflects who they think they are. We are so steeped in millennia of accumulated information that we suffer from the same illness every human in every age has, the myopia that makes us blind to the very fact that we are drenched in this history and the truths of our knowledge. We are bound to it and cannot escape it.

Moving beyond the names themselves, one could take on the letters and characters of whatever alphabet spells out a name and dissect each and every aspect of names as identifiers. Each element will bear witness to some current of history, the phonetics will tell a tale of different geopolitical shifts that have happened over the centuries. The roots will go deep into the past, having a knock-on effect, so that the stories connecting the elements and sounds to the meaning they convey will reach further and further back. Without the agreement over such things there would be no significance in pride in any kind of identity, no matter where it comes from or what it is connected to. And pride is just the peak, the entire mountain that it is built on would be of no significance, the millions of components that establish the foundations and structures of our understanding of the world, critical or not, are built from the history of truths. Agreement lies at the base of a thriving society, not denial and unwillingness. These current activities and statements are not positions of any kind, but simply reactions.

On top of this, treasured identities will also always be constituted, in part, by many conventions that people will find antithetical to their own beliefs. The traditions of knowledge and their many transfers and transformations across cultures, mean that ideas and elements of one’s identities may have their origin in places and from people that one might find dubious. There are so many “live” elements to names as cultural identifiers that a simple discussion about them is a gateway to questioning who a person thinks they may be and, if one feels inclined to do so and has sufficient knowledge, one can take that conversation to very uncomfortable places. This simple exploration of the concept of names is therefore also an illustration of a type of neutrality in our basic knowledge concerning the world. Only when we apply it to certain ends, or use it to justify ourselves or our actions does it attain meaning and thereby becomes a political issue.

Knowledge and facts as we know them (they are, after all, only “our” facts) are the foundations for the structures we have built up to understand the world that surrounds us. Without the accepted truths of our knowledge one couldn’t even make the argument against facts – truths are the prerequisite for the information and knowledge structures that allow us to think critically. Everything we do or know is based on this tradition of knowledge, which is constantly evolving. The structures for navigating our world - the social frameworks, the institutions - are the result of this tradition. To doubt facts is to say “I do not feel comfortable in this world and I feel disoriented by the many things I don’t know.” Yet one’s name and identity are steeped in these very facts and the knowledge they beget, whether you understand it or not. One simple question could be the conversation starter that initiates a journey down the many roads of human history and knowledge. Why anyone would not be interested in where we all get our ideas from, and who we actually are, is highly perplexing.