the Truth shall make you free. In John 8:32 be formulated in a promise that represents one of western culture’s mainstays. The truth is. It can be difficult, yes impossible to find it, but it is there.
It is the essence of the scientific approach to the world. It is the Enlightenment of the gospel. It is modernity’s motor. Ideological systems like marxism and psychoanalysis is based on the belief that human emancipation depends veiled or repressed truths brought to light, is made aware. So also motivates the journalist to his role in society. By ”review” and ”reveal” and ”tell the truth” nourishes and strengthens journalism in democracy.
That is why the big German news magazine Der Spiegel has made the phrase ”Sagen was ist”, tell it like it is, their motto. And it is, therefore, the newspaper is in deep existential crisis after the revelation that one of the magazine’s star reporters fake a large number of their high-profile reportage.
the noisy populists trying to get the world to believe, ”Lügenpresse! Lügenpresse”, journalists are not their lust and their living in the lie. On the contrary. The lie is a journalistic mortal sin. Mistake? Often. The excesses? Sure. ”Angles”? Absolutely, for the truth is, however, one can approach it from many different directions. Deliberately lying? Never. Liar will be banished from the skrået.
With the art (images, literature, drama) is completely different. Its promise is: the Lie shall make you free, to search deeper or konturskarpare or more complex truths about man and the world. As sanningskälla, art is as indispensible as journalism and science. But it is different. It is important to not forget about it.
”Peer, you’re lying!” It is the first thing that is said in Henrik ibsen’s saga-drama of king’s ”Peer Gynt”, and of course there is pure truth, for Peer Gynt is a poet dressed as a fjällbonde. He, and Ibsen, the search for truth by telling stories. In one of the most famous scenes meet Peer goblin’s king, Dovregubben, who offers him his daughter as a wife. But then Peer understood yourself to be a troll, with a tail, and the other belongs to.
Dovrekungen explains that he will give the Peer a scratching in the eye. Once he has done that, everything now seems ugly and distorted in the goblin’s world to emerge as self-evident and normal. It is so nättrollen work. They scratch us in the eyes with their digital needles.
in these trolltiden is not that the truth is being crushed by the lie, but that the difference between them is made uninteresting and unimportant. The major threat is the risk that more people will relate to reality in the same way as the nätkommentator as the face of the statement that ”the news” to a little girl tillrättavisats of his rector that she had a Swedish flag on the mobilskalet was false ruled: ”I do not care that it is fake, it’s too damn anyway”. (The exclamation has later become the title of a book by the viralgranskande journalist Jack Werner).
What now happens is that, instead gränsmuren between the lie and the truth exposed for syrattacker and slowly corrode.
Behind the dissolution of the border between truth and lies, facts and fiction, which characterises the contemporary era are more profound and collaborative social, cultural and economic factors. Some of them are reported in a recent report from the influential american think tank Rand Corporation. The report title is in its simplicity somewhat ingenious: ”Truth Decay”, Sanningsröta. Sanningsförruttnelse. Sanningsförfall.
that truth changed into a lie. A liar can always be revealed. What now happens is that, instead gränsmuren between the lie and the truth exposed for syrattacker and slowly corrode. White is not done to the black. Instead, the flows of the white and black together to the diffuse gray areas.
the Rand Corporation’s president is Michael D Rich recently presented the report at a conference at the Swedish-Finnish cultural centre Hanasaari in Helsinki. He highlighted four criteria of ”sanningsförfall” in an american context. 1) A growing disagreement on the facts and analyses of facts. 2) the Dissolution of the border between opinions and facts. 3) Opinions and personal experiences are given more space and weight than the facts. 4) Declining respect for the institutions that constitute the faktakällor.
the Report stresses that sanningsröta is not a new phenomenon. The rot has been felt also in the other periods in AMERICA’s modern history: The decades before the turn of the century 1900 which is commonly called The Gilded Age, the 1920’s and 30’s, 1960-70’s. It is characteristic for these periods has been significant economic and social changes in combination with mass media revolutions.
these medierevolutioner is, of course, digitisation and social media to the occupation of time, space, and consciousness. How profound and radical implications will be remains to be seen. But it is noteworthy that the Rand report designers can point to all the criteria on the sanningsförfall except a go to look forward also in previous förfallsperioder. The characteristics that would be unique to our time is the first criterion, the tendency to not want to accept the facts even when there is scientific consensus around them. In Sweden we talk about ”faktaresistens”.
the Notion that there is no objective, common truths, paves the way for a series of dystopian political consequences; in particular, in-depth polarization and brutal kulturkrig. A less publicized, but also problematic consequence, came to the fore on Saturday in a chronicle of Anna-Lena Laurén: the risk that we in the sanningsupplösningens time start to crave authoritarian overconfidence. Already you can sense that soon it will be spring for the prophets. Players who do not need to search for the truth because they already possess the, whole and complete and one hundred percent: figures such as grabbgurun Jordan B Peterson.
