I read recently that people are selling their kidneys. Not because they want to. To feed their starving kids. Which people? It shouldn’t matter, should it? Later, I’ll tell you who.
Nobody should have to do that. Stop and think about that for a second. Think about being so desperate you sell your kidney to feed your kid because otherwise, they’ll starve. Think about the cold terror in your stomach. Your veins turning to ice. Think about the way your kid smiles.
It’s a vivid example of a trend that bears thinking about. One which reflects a dark age. Nothing matters. We should — all of us, I mean — care about people who must sell their kidneys to feed their kids. But we don’t. We, the big we, care about…superhero movies…more than that. I’m not kidding. The average person in our societies literally cares more about…another Batman movie…another Marvel Avengers part 74…than people selling their organs to feed their starving kids. And worse, funnily, if you challenge them, they’ll fight you. The World Really Needs Another Batman Movie!!
Something is very, very wrong with our societies. They are sick now. They have been infected by a virus, and it’s not (just) Covid. Nothing matters anymore. Nothing real. Nothing urgent, true, decent, sane. Batman movies matter more than anything — anything — vaguely real.
And that’s putting it kindly, because it only gets worse from there. Batman movies are innocuous. They’re not harmful, just dumb. Adults watching superhero movies is a literal example of infantile narcissistic regression. And it’s an understandable one when the world is burning up and collapsing into fascism. Hello, adults, the world does not need another Batman movie, and Batman isn’t coming to save us.
But nothing mattering — nothing except my own infantile narcissistic regression to tantrums, rage, defensiveness, glee, fury — takes much worse forms. Anti vaxxing. Covid denial. Climate change denial. Nationalism and extremism. The outright fascism rising across the globe.
The death of the truth goes by another name, too — the Age of the Big Lie. They’re two ways of saying the same thing. A Big Lie is a dead truth. And so to really understand this age of Big Lies, the question that needs to be asked is this: why and how did truth die? Why does nothing matter anymore?
The death of truth is a virus now spreading around the world. It’s an “infodemic,” as Maria Van Kerkhove very incisively pointed out. It began in America — and yet it’s spreading even to countries once rich in truth, like Canada, France, Germany, Britain, and beyond.
The truth dying and nothing mattering is a global issue. An urgent one, because quite obviously, we can hardly solve our bigger problems, from pandemic to climate change, when nothing real or urgent or serious matters, and the average person cares more about superhero movies than people selling their kidneys to feed their kids, the planet melting down, the mass extinction of life on earth (which, yes, is really happening), widespread political destabilization, simmering social implosion, Covid mutating into something worse, or any multitude of existential threats humanity now faces.
How did we get here, to this awful and dire place where nothing matters?
The finger’s often pointed at social media. That amplifies untruths, yes. But the etiology of this illness — the death of truth, the rise of nothing mattering — goes deeper than that. The pathogenesis of this virus began in America, and then spread worldwide, and while social media is a necessary condition for it, a proximal cause, it’s not the ultimate cause.
I stopped reading American newspapers around 2010. By then, I’d realised that they had nothing much to say that was true. I don’t mean to malign good journalists — I mean that in a slightly different way. They barely bothered to cover serious and urgent issues, especially global ones. And something even more disturbing was true. Their pundits were always wrong. So I stopped reading those — and kept reading papers and journalism from around the world instead. My brain was much better for it.
These days, I check American newspapers — only for perverse reasons. To chuckle. What are the pundits wrong about today? I can give you endless examples. David Leonhardt from the New York Times has pronounced Covid “in retreat” what…five times? He doesn’t even bother to change the words. Surprising? Hardly, from a newspaper whose columnists include a climate change denier, and a youngish man who essentially proposed women should be forced into sexual slavery.
You can see why I thought American culture is bad for my brain. This is America’s most “renowned” newspaper. And it’s pundits are always wrong. Always. It’s almost a rule at this point. With maybe the exception of Paul Krugman, you could make a fortune betting against what these jokers have to say. That sounds harsh, but think about it.
If your doctor was always wrong…you’d get a new doctor. If your accountant was wrong, you’d go broke, and sue him. But America’s pundits have been wrong for decades. And there they are, still being wrong. About everything from Covid to climate change.
It’s a little amazing. Let me come to the point.
When the death of truth is examined in a little more detail, it should become apparent that truth stopped mattering a long time ago. And the first culpable party in this mega trend of the death of truth are pundits. They are serially wrong. And yet they never, ever face any consequences. Take Leonhardt. You’d think he’d at least apologise, for getting it wrong, for literally saying Covid was the flu. But he’s, I guess, shameless. The New York Times isn’t interested in correcting this shoddy take. And it’s the best America has. It gets worse from there. So if the “real” newspapers are that bad, how much worse is Fox allowed to be? You see my point, perhaps.
Americans don’t quite understand that punditry is a uniquely American invention. It isn’t like this in most of the rest of the world — or at least it didn’t used to be. America invented these figures called “pundits.” They have no real experience or credentials. They are fake public intellectuals. In the rest of the world, at least once upon a time until not so long ago, there weren’t “pundits,” there were actual public intellectuals. People with boatloads of degrees who’d studied subjects intensely and intently, academics, professors, artists, scientists, thinkers of a serious and studied calibre.
The pundit is completely different from such a figure. Pundits don’t have advanced degrees, they haven’t studied the subjects they opine on, they have no real world experience of them, not to mention experience in a lab, with the theory, the science, the art, the craft of a thing. They are just…empty puppets. They literally don’t know the first thing about most of the things they write about. Take me for example. I studied economics intensely, only to be attacked (I still am) by journalists who couldn’t tell you Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation from Kalecki’s theories of effective demand. I want you see the point, which is that pundits are fake public intellectuals.
That is why they have no interest in truth. The point of being a thinker — a serious one, a careful one — or just a thoughtful person is truth. We are trying to discover what is real, actual, solid, maybe even immutable and eternal. To think seriously is to care intensely about not just “the” truth, but what truth is. Pundits don’t care whatsoever about truth. That’s why there they are, spouting this fabulist nonsense today — the economy’s booming, Covid’s over, whatever — and getting it wrong, over and over again, and not even having the courage or decency to say, “Sorry guys, I was wrong.” That in itself is the admission that they’re not interested in the truth.
So what is the average person to believe? What norms does it create when a society has a class of pseudo-intellectuals totally disinterested in truth? Totally uninvested in it, to the point of not even bothering to care or understand what the idea of “truth” is? Who never face any consequences for not telling it?
Quite obviously a society with an elite class of pundits, figures are not serious public intellectuals, just pretending to be ones, which is a society disinterested in truth — it learns that truth doesn’t matter. It develops the idea that truth isn’t worth very much. It can’t be, if you can earn a million dollars plus as a pundit at the most prestigious publications — not even, LOL, Spotify — for never having to tell it, respect it, know it, spread it, say it, but for saying things like women should be sex slaves or climate change doesn’t exist. Come on. A society like that does not develop healthy norms regarding truth. Instead, truth itself has been delegitimized. And the atmosphere is now ripe for Big Lies.
In other words, littler lies pave the way for Big Ones. When a Ross Douthat who’s a New York Times essentially suggests women should be sex slaves…should we be surprised that millions of Americans want to ban books and even theories?
The road on which truth died was paved by the hands of pundits. The truth ceases to matter when punditry replaced real intellect as the mind of a society, because pundits are not interested in the truth in the first place. They delegimitize and destabilise it. A society never develops a healthy respect for, interest in, attachment to truth. Why should it, when the people whose job it is, purportedly, to safeguard are the very ones who snatch it away from you?
Sadly, this is no longer just an American issue. Punditry is replacing real intellect as the mind of a society across the globe. And wherever it spreads, if you watch carefully, you can see something happen, in short order. Truth begins to die. It isn’t just social media which is beginning to kill truth even in Canada and Europe and beyond — it’s that these societies once had vibrant public intellect, and now, more and more, that is being replaced by American style punditry.
The American style of “cable news talk shows” and “talk radio” and newspaper “columnists” is spreading around the globe. And wherever it goes, the truth begins to die. Let’s take two diametrical opposite countries, India and Canada. One rich, one poor. Truth is beginning to suffer terribly in both countries. Why is that? American style punditry arrived about a decade or so ago. And from that development alone, you could have predicted that the truth would begin to die.
The second culpable party in the death of truth is politicians. It’s not just the hard right who is telling Big Lies these days. It’s also the centre left, sadly. Even in sophisticated and gentle places like Canada and Europe. The hard right’s Big Lies are well known: hate is the answer to the woes of the true of blood and pure of faith, cleanse your societies of the hated subhumans, and you will be Great Again.
But the Big Lies of the centre left are no less dangerous. What are they? Covid’s over. Don’t worry, the planet isn’t dying. No, we don’t have just a handful of years left to stop climate change from hitting irreversible tipping points, like ocean currents slowing and boreal forests burning and ice sheets melting. Everything’s fine — austerity’s a good thing, just like the right says, and societies should never increase their levels of investment. No, there’s not a mass extinction of life on planet earth — and no, we’re not a part of it anyways, so why should it matter? We don’t face the cataclysmic problem of rapidly declining living standards on a dying planet. We can keep on choosing “lifestyles” that please us, and ignore everything else, while overconsuming ourselves and the planet into swift oblivion.
Those are Big Lies, too. It pains me to say it. Because the centre left is hurting these days, and I don’t like to kick someone when they’re down. But it can’t not be said, either. The Big Lies of the centre left, at this juncture in history, are just as dangerous and ubiquitous as those of the hard right. One is about fascism, the other is about ignoring a dying planet, and a declining civilization, sobbing and screaming in terrible pain. Which is worse? Does it even matter?
Both sides of our politics are now made of Big Lies. I don’t mean to sound like Alex Jones, the very kinds of fanatics I’m condemning. I mean it in a calm and reasoned way, if a sad and disappointed one.
But when politics itself is only made of Big Lies…then what happens to truth? The average person, taking their cues from all this, comes to understand that truth doesn’t matter. They exist in a state where truth itself has no meaning, purpose, point, value. After all, if the leaders of their societies don’t think it does, then…why should they?
And if the leaders of societies — political ones and intellectuals ones both — are disinterested in truth to the point that both politics and public debate is now just made of Big Lies on both sides…then in what way can the average person ever be interested in the truth? Know it? Cherish it? Even come into contact with it?
So the average person gets on social media, and just begins opining. Like a pundit. Like a politician. They are just modelling their behaviour on the leaders of their societies. The truth doesn’t matter to them, the average person thinks, so what difference can it possibly make to me? I will just say what I “believe.” I won’t bother to know. Learn, enlighten myself, understand, reason, think. I don’t need to use my mind. I just need to let all these terrible feelings out. Rage, pain, despair, neglect, abandonment by failed systems and institutions. I need to express this loneliness and humiliation. Bang.
Nothing matters.
Our societies are made of Big Lies now. From littler ones — like Covid is over, or inflation will go away, or American style capitalism is a wonderful success, or social democracy is “debatable,” as if it’s not an empirical fact that it’s history’s most successful form of political economy — to really big ones, like climate change is some distant problem, and large regions of the world aren’t going to be uninhabitable in a few years, Fire Belts, Flood Belts, sunk, drowned, burned — to really, really big ones, like life on the planet isn’t in an existential crisis of annihilation, and we’re part of life on this planet.
Our societies are made of Big Lies. Both sides of politics repeat their own Big Lies, ad nauseam. Pundits repeat theirs, without fear of repercussion, consequences. Taking their cues from this, the average person now has the tool of social media, to express their own disinterest in and contempt for truth, to shatter it with a scream of rage, or laugh at it with mockery, or neglect it with some stupid discussion of how the World Really Needs Another Batman Movie.
Our societies’ minds have stopped working. Norms of healthy respect, interest in, cherishment of truth have withered as a result. Truth as in serious and real truth, like gravity exists, like causes and effects are real, like logic works, like empirical facts exist.
Nothing matters. We live in societies where people care more about another superhero movie than those selling their kidneys to feed their starving kids. But you know what? Societies that indifferent, that pathetically numb, that thoughtless…they can’t stay democracies, or even functioning ones, for very long.
Our societies are dying because the truth is. Nothing matters anymore, at least not to the average person, having taken their cues from politicians and pundits, to whom nothing matters either. That leaves the dwindling numbers of sane and thoughtful in a difficult place. One called a Dark Age.
Umair
February 2022
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