The Birth of a Post-Truth Culture

An Excerpt from A Post-Truth World
By Ken Wilber

About This Title

A piercing examination of our current social and political situation through the lens of Integral Theory—by the framework’s founder, cutting-edge philosopher Ken Wilber.

Our overwhelmingly divisive socio-political climate is among the greatest challenges of our time. Not only in America but also internationally, it seems that almost every issue raises incredibly vocal oppositional views. Not least of all, the arising of vast networks of disinformation is a testament to our deepening rifts. With so much hostility, antagonism, cynicism, and discord, how can we mend the ruptures in our society?

Acclaimed philosopher Ken Wilber examines our polarization through the lens of Integral Theory to show what led to these fractures, both in America and around the world—as well as what is needed for humanity to move forward. In his provocative analysis, he explores how the arising of support for antagonistic authoritarians represents a backlash against the failure of those at the leading edge of consciousness (postmodernism and pluralism) to acknowledge the challenges that persist amidst our imagined progress: that, to date, society has been not proven to be equal, and liberty and justice have not been consistent for all. But a new Integral force is emerging that can move beyond the narcissism, nihilism, and cynicism to offer genuine leadership and move us all toward greater wholeness. All of us can be part of the movement, and here Ken Wilber shows us how.

The Birth of a Post-Truth Culture
Chapter 3, page 25-37

Back to the post-truth culture that a collapsed green had left us with. The promoters of Brexit openly admitted that they had pushed ideas that they fully knew were not “true,” but they did so “because there really are no facts,” and what really counts is “that we truly believe this.” (As one of them tellingly noted, “I’ve read my Lacan—it’s whoever controls the narrative that counts,” citing Jacques Lacan, a leading postmodernist.) In other words, narcissism is the deciding factor—what I want to be true is true in a post-truth culture. President Trump doesn’t even try to hide this; he lies factually with gleeful abandon. Reporter Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, stated that “Trump lives and thrives in a fact-free environment. No president, including Richard Nixon, has been so ignorant of fact and disdains fact in the way this president-elect does.” His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said that this is not really lying, it is just “alternative facts” (to which one reporter responded, “‘Alternative facts’ means falsehoods”). But when there are no facts to begin with, nobody tells lies or falsehoods, just alternative, equally valuable facts.

While Trump was campaigning, there were newspapers that actually kept count of the number of factual lies he had spoken, day by day: “Yesterday, it was 17 lies. Today, it was 15 lies.” The website Politifact posts such counts and concluded that approximately 50 percent of everything Trump claimed was not factually true (!). And yet polls consistently showed that people felt Trump was “more truthful” than Hillary Clinton (who, no matter how much of an atmosphere of “corruption” followed her, as many believed, she never set out explicitly and blatantly to lie, or certainly nowhere near as much as Trump). But people had already made the transition from “factual truth” to “what I say is truth,” and Trump said his “truth” with much more conviction and passion than Hillary could muster—and thus in a no-truth culture, Trump was the “more truthful.” In a culture of nihilism, in an atmosphere of aperspectival madness where there is no real truth, truth becomes whatever I most fervently desire—in a sea of nihilism, passionate narcissism is the key determinant.

Note that the Boomers—the children of the sixties—are often called “the Me generation” and the “culture of Narcissism.” And, compared to previous generations, this tended to be very true. As Boomers themselves began taking over education in this country, they significantly began shifting it so that education emphasized, first and foremost, a movement not of “teaching truth”—because there is no truth—but instead of promoting “self-esteem.” And what they discovered—as a Time magazine cover story reported—is that promoting self-esteem, without anchoring it in actual accomplishments, simply ends up increasing narcissism. (Again, in a sea of no-truth nihilism, narcissism is all that’s left—what else could the Boomers promote?) And indeed, the recent graduating class of Boomer-taught kids scored higher on amounts of narcissism than any class since testing began—some 2 to 3 times higher than their Boomer “Me generation” parents! Hence, one wag suggested calling this the “Me-Me-Me generation.” In any event, a narcissistic emphasis on “special me” had indeed seeped into the culture at large. Among many other items, we would see the emergence of the “selfie culture,” which notoriously and easily altered, even Photoshopped, individual truth, and whose social media began promoting “pleasing lies” and “reassuring falsehoods” in echo chambers that never dared to challenge one’s special self-promoting facts.

Meanwhile, the leading-edge green cultural elites—upper-level liberal government, virtually all university teachers (in the humanities), technology innovators, human services professionals, most in the media and entertainment, and most highly liberal thought leaders—continued to push into green pluralism/relativism—“what’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me”—all largely with intentions of pure gold, but shot through with an inherently self-contradictory stance with its profound limitations. (Thus, for example, the statement itself—“what’s true for me is true for me, and what’s true for you is true for you”—actually claims to be a superior truth that is not open to challenge, and you are not supposed to disagree with that statement and actually have your own different opinion. You’re definitely not supposed to think that “what’s true for me is true for me, and it also better be true for you, too,” even though the statement itself claims you can. If that’s your truth, you are definitely not allowed to have it, or I’ll claim you’re a fascist or some such, since you’re trying to force your truth on me.) In addition to the problem of self-contradiction, there’s the problem that, if all truth is just truth for me and a different truth for you, then there is no “truth for us”—or collective, cohering, unifying truths. Hence, in this atmosphere of aperspectival madness, the stage was set for massively fragmented culture, which the siloed boxes and echo chambers of social media were beginning to almost exclusively promote and enhance.

Now green itself is a worldcentric stage. Although it gets theoretically confused about anything being “worldcentric” (or “universal”)—namely, it thinks that all such moves are oppressive and power-driven—we’ve seen that green postmodernism itself deeply believes that what it is saying is true for all people; it doesn’t apply to just one group or another (“ethnocentric”), it applies to all groups, all humans (“worldcentric”). But under its own confusion of aperspectival madness, where you cannot criticize any particular value (since all are egalitarian) and all worldcentric or universal stances are aggressively denied, individuals are allowed to actively slide into, even regress to, ethnocentric stances. And thus the postmodern-created online social media began regressing into decidedly ethnocentric-leaning groups.

And this happened on the conservative and liberal sides alike. On the conservative side, it was led by “trolls,” or truly nasty ethnocentric Web surfers who posted endless condemnations aimed at any minority or minority viewpoint, and who were genuinely mean-spirited and spewing enormous amounts of anger and hatred. Yet liberals as well gleefully joined the ethnocentric stampede. Having implicitly denied any worldcentric or universal truths, liberals simply began an obsessive search for ethnocentric after more ethnocentric after yet more ethnocentric. One of the results of this slide, among many, was “identity politics,” where you actively and aggressively identify with (and define yourself solely as) just one race or class or sex or creed (or political orientation or religion or nationality, and so on)—exactly a slide from worldcentric to ethnocentric identity. And if you’re not a member of an obvious minority identity, then you have no real voice in how this country should culturally move forward (whereas real weight would be given to, say, a transgendered, bipolar, female Muslim, which is ethnocentric to the fourth power). There’s not a single thing wrong with any one of those minorities—and every reason they should be fairly and liberally embraced in a worldcentric stance. But if you listen to only decidedly ethnocentric-identified voices, then that evidences exactly the partiality and divisiveness you claim you’re trying to overcome. This is a slide exacerbated by the fact that it is openly and vocally embraced with hyper-pride. (It’s fine to be proud of one’s race or sex or creed, as long as it is alongside other such types and not instead of them or above them or superior to them, which all too often is exactly where identity politics ends up.)

With no truth to slow it, this regression to ethnocentric—by liberals and conservatives alike—simply exploded all over the Web. The original intent of the Internet was for a global, free, unified humanity, unleashed from oppression, information ownership, power structures, and isolating trends in general. The Net was proclaimed a single grand “global brain,” open to and actively embracing all. 

The problem is, if the brain was global (or a single infrastructure network), the minds using it were not. As Douglas Rushkoff has pointed out, the very nature of the digital environment itself tends toward either/or types of decisions (either 1 or 0, click here or click there, choose this or choose that). And the anonymity and personality-hiding nature of online exchange allowed and even fostered regressive tendencies of aggression, narcissism, hatred, and innumerable passionate ethnocentric beliefs (sexist, racist, xenophobic, zealous religious, bigoted political, those of trolls and identity politics), and with no “truth” available to challenge any of these moves, they exploded. The entire online experience collapsed from one of unity, open-natured expanse, and worldwide integration, into one of siloed, boxed, separatist, mean-spirited ethnocentric drives. And these poured out of our laptops and smartphones 24/7 and into the culture at large.

A NEW AND ALARMING LEGITIMATION CRISIS 

The problem very quickly became what Integral Metatheory calls a “legitimation crisis,” which it defines as a mismatch between Lower-Left, or cultural, beliefs and the Lower-Right systems, or actual background realities, such as the techno-economic base. (“Left” and “Right” do not here refer to political parties but simply to their location on a typical 4-quadrant chart: the “Left-Hand” quadrants represent invisible interior realities—such as those of morals, values, consciousness, and beliefs—and the “Right‑Hand” quadrants refer to visible exterior realities—such as concrete techno-economic systems and environments. And a “legitimation crisis” is a profound conflict and mismatch between these two dimensions in any society.)

The cultural belief was that everybody is created equal, that all people have a perfect and equal right to full personal empowerment, that nobody is intrinsically superior to anybody else (beliefs that flourished with green). Yet the overwhelming reality was increasingly one of a stark and rapidly growing inequality—in terms of income and overall worth, property ownership, employment opportunity, healthcare access, and life satisfaction issues. The culture was constantly telling us one thing, and the realities of society were consistently failing to deliver it—the culture was lying. This was a deep and serious legitimation crisis: a culture that is consistently lying to its members simply cannot move forward for long. And if a culture has “no truth,” it has no idea when it’s lying—and thus it naturally lies as many times as it accidentally tells the truth; hence, faster than you can say “deconstruction,” it’s in the midst of a legitimation crisis.

When it came to the problems of unemployment and wealth inequality, leading-edge technology also was not helping. (Not to mention the fact that capital itself, as economist Thomas Piketty pointed out, was inherently biased toward favoring the rich and excluding the poor.) Technology had long moved into being the material-system correlate (in the Lower Right) of the cultural beliefs of the green stage (in the Lower Left). The green “Information Age” believed that all knowledge is equal, and it should be totally free and totally uncensored—it was common to say that the Net interprets censorship as a system failure and routes around it. But search engines did not prioritize knowledge in terms of truth, or goodness, or beauty, or inclusivity, or any depth, or any value system at all—not even a growth hierarchy of values or facts—just in terms of popularity and most use. Truth played no role in it. Facebook finally admitted that it posted many “fake news” stories on its platform, which many have claimed helped Trump to win. It did so simply because its algorithms weren’t created to check for truth, just the user’s narcissistic tendencies. And it is now faced, along with every other online news outlet, with the necessity of creating algorithms that detect—and bracket—“fake news” items, which is going to be much harder than imagined given a background of “no truth” to work from.

(Another reason that “fake news” will not be that easy to sort out has to do with the partial truth of postmodernism: all knowledge is context dependent. This partial truth is indeed true, and is fully incorporated into Integral Metatheory. But what this means is that, in addition to the phenomenological world of basic, sensorimotor facts, there are the very real worlds of red realities or facts, amber realities or facts, orange realities or facts, green realities or facts, and turquoise realities or facts. Thus, when it comes to something like Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, a sensorimotor fact is that it did indeed occur in 1492. That is true; that is indeed a fact—a sensorimotor or physical fact. But when it comes to the facts regarding things like, “Why did Columbus do this?” “What effect did it have on the natives?” and “What were the overall results?” each level of being and awareness has a different context, and a different co-construction, regarding those answers. Each of them will therefore give answers that reflect the “reality” or the “facts” of its level—and each of those levels or stages differs significantly. What you don’t want to do with such a contextual field of facts is to deny truth or facts altogether, because that denies the realities that any and all levels are actually aware of—and that is the disaster we are examining now. When it comes to the further issue of, “So, given a growth hierarchy of different but real facts at each level, how exactly do you determine what is genuinely truth, or what facts are actually real?” it is, needless to say, a very complex issue for which I recommend Integral Metatheory, which approaches this topic precisely and very directly. We’ll also return to this issue very briefly a little later on. For now we are dealing with the much more specific and simpler issue of what happens when truth itself, or facts altogether, are denied—and how the Net itself has fallen prey to this disastrous tendency of aperspectival madness. That is the issue here.) 

In terms of searching, in a sea of aperspectival madness, not for truth or goodness or beauty—and especially bypassing “truth” entirely—and looking just for narcissistic popularity, Google itself has recently been slammed with exactly that charge of dismissing or distorting truth, and those screaming “J’accuse!” are rightly and massively alarmed. 

Carole Cadwalladr, in a recent Guardian article, pointed out that Google’s search algorithms reflect virtually nothing but the popularity of the most-responded-to sites for the search inquiry. There is nothing that checks whether any of the recommendations are actually true (or good or beautiful or unifying or integrating or any other value, and express only the aperspectival madness of “no truth to be favored”). Cadwalladr was particularly alarmed when she typed in “Are Jews . . . ” and before she could finish, Google’s search engines had provided the most likely responses, one of which was “Are Jews evil?” Curious, she hit that entry, and was taken to the authoritative Google page of the ten most common and popular answers, nine of which said, in effect, “Yes, definitely, Jews are evil.”

Genuinely surprised—and disturbed—she states, “Google is knowledge. It’s where you go to find things out. And evil Jews are just the start of it. There are also evil women. . . . This is what I type: ‘a-r-e w-o-m-e-’. And Google offers me just two choices, the first of which is: ‘Are women evil?’ I press return. Yes, they are. Every one of the 10 results ‘confirms’ that they are [my emphasis], including the top one . . . , which is boxed out and highlighted: ‘Every woman has some degree of prostitute in her. Every woman has a little evil in her. . . . Women don’t love men, they love what they can do for them.’”

With her disbelief—and alarm—growing, Cadwalladr continues, “Next I type: ‘a-r-e m-u-s-l-i-m-s’. And Google suggests I should ask: ‘Are Muslims bad?’ And here’s what I find out: yes, they are. That’s what the top result says and six of the others. . . . Google offers me two new searches and I go for the first, ‘Islam is bad for society.’ In the next list of suggestions, I’m offered: ‘Islam must be destroyed.’”

Here’s her response:

Google is search. It’s the verb, to Google. It’s what we all do, all the time, whenever we want to know anything. We Google it. The site handles at least 63,000 searches a second, 5.5bn [billion] a day. Its mission as a company, the one-line overview that has informed the company since its foundation and is still the banner headline on its corporate website today, is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. It strives to give you the best, most relevant results. . . . 

Jews are evil. [Women are evil.] Muslims need to be eradicated. And Hitler? Do you want to know about Hitler? Let’s Google it. “Was Hitler bad?” I type. And here’s Google’s top result: “10 Reasons Why Hitler Was One of the Good Guys”. I click on the link: “He never wanted to kill any Jews”; “he cared about conditions for Jews in the work camps”. . . . Eight out of the other 10 search results agree.

Google is most definitely not “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful.” It is disorganizing the world’s information in an atmosphere of aperspectival madness, taking “diversity” to such an extreme that all views have an egalitarian and perfectly equal claim to validity—if, and only if, each wannabe truth is backed with enough passionate narcissism and outrageously fervent belief to make it really popular. And Google makes its living by selling these post-truths and alternative facts. Lies don’t come cheap; there’s a hefty advertising fee to reach these groups—and the more passionate and intense and vigorous the vote rating, the higher the advertising rates. This is because these groups with similarly held beliefs—“All women are evil”—compose highly motivated markets for the products that the advertiser wants to promote, because these groups are what are called “lookalike audiences”—that is, they all look and think alike in an echo chamber, totally predisposed to agree with one post-truth or alternative fact, such as “all Muslims must be destroyed” or “all Jews are evil.” These statements are not anything resembling real truth, but are the very passionately held ethnocentric prejudices passing for truth in a post-truth world gone slightly mad. And Google is doling these out to the world as fast as it humanly and robotically can, 63,000 times a second, 5.5 billion times a day.

(Due to serious protests, Google deliberately overrode its algorithm and manually, as it were, altered some of the above results—apparently not of its own volition, but in response to the very vocal protests. Does the removal of the many thousands of similar items also await protest, because they don’t appear to be disappearing on their own? Google’s Jigsaw company has created a program called Perspective, whose algorithm focuses on detecting “toxicity,” or items that are likely to offend somebody and drive them out of a conversation. But this is still not truth-checking; it’s just offensiveness-checking. Not the same thing. Truth just doesn’t seem to register.) 

No wonder reports keep showing up like the one called “The Miseducation of Dylann Roof” (a video presented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC). Dylann Roof was a very young man who, seemingly for no reason at all, randomly shot and killed nine African Americans while they were praying at the historic Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. (Not central to this particular presentation, but deeply notable for its radiant goodness, is the stunning and completely sincere compassion that most of these families displayed and expressed directly to the murderer—not hatred and revenge, but love and forgiveness—and as a galvanized, frozen-with-awe nation looked on, dry eyes hard to find, family member after family member looked directly at Roof and forgave him. There is surely a lesson in here for the time that we are discussing now, which has more than a small amount of its own hatred in play.)

Roof was raised in a by-all-accounts quite decent family, with no history of racism or racial hatred. As he tells the story in his online manifesto (written shortly before the deadly attack), he says that he heard of a lethal shooting between a black and a white man, the first time he had really noticed something like that, and so “more importantly this prompted me to type the words ‘black on white crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.”

He has never been the same because the search engine kept driving him to site after site simmering with “facts” quite similar to “all Jews are evil” and “all Muslims should be destroyed”—“facts” about how violent African Americans are, how they are a “retrograde species” that “should be eliminated.” The SPLC maintains that this misinformation itself was the basis for what drove Roof to his crimes, according to what Roof himself has said. Whatever we decide about that, it is definitely true, as the SPLC puts it, that “the truth got submerged.”

Google explicitly counters these kinds of charges by claiming that “Google’s algorithm takes into account how trustworthy, reputable, and authoritative the source is.” But do the statements “All women are evil,” “All Jews are evil,” “All Muslims must be destroyed,” and “African Americans are a retrograde species” (as one website told Dylan Roof when he searched “black on white crime”)—does any one of those sound anywhere near “trustworthy,” or “reputable,” or “authoritative”? That’s so deeply off the mark, how did Google even come to claim something like that? How could it be so dismissive of truth as to not even include it as selection criteria in its search algorithms? One answer: in a “post-truth” culture, truth has simply dropped off our list of genuinely valued and idealized items. And that is exactly how Google, Facebook, “fake news,” “alternative facts”—all of those and more—have already become part of the disastrous, but to-be-expected, new morals for the new century. “Fake news” is the new news.

I’ll finish with Cadwalladr’s story—it has such an unsettling ending. Being genuinely concerned about, even disturbed by, her discoveries about Google’s seemingly built-in lack of concern for truth, Cadwalladr contacted Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land (searchengineland.com). “[Sullivan has] been recommended to me by several academics as one of the most knowledgeable experts on search. Am I just being naive, I ask him? Should I have known this was out there? ‘No, you’re not being naive,’ he says. ‘This is awful. . . . Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here.’ . . . He’s surprised, too. . . . [H]e types ‘are women’ into his own computer. ‘Good lord! That answer at the top. It’s a featured result. It’s called a ‘direct answer.’ This is supposed to be indisputable. It’s Google’s highest endorsement.’ That every woman has some degree of prostitute in her? ‘Yes. This is Google’s algorithm going terribly wrong.’”

And it’s going “terribly wrong” because today’s leading-edge has virtually no idea of what “genuinely right” could possibly mean. The Guardian highlights the overall piece by pointing out that it doesn’t apply just to Google, but also to Facebook and, indeed, the general Internet culture itself: “The Internet echo chamber satiates our appetite for pleasant lies and reassuring falsehoods and has become the defining challenge of the 21st century.”

How could an item have become the “defining issue” of our century without virtually every university in the world spewing out postmodern poststructuralist nostrums centering on the idea that “truth” itself is the single greatest oppressive force in the history of humankind? (Seriously.) Originated by the green leading-edge in academia, this aperspectival madness of “no truth” leapt out of the universities, and morphed into an enormous variety of different forms—from direct “no truth” claims, to rabid egalitarianism, to excessive censoring of free speech and unhampered knowledge acquisition, to extreme political correctness (that forced the best comedians to refuse to perform at colleges anymore, since the audiences “lacked all sense of humor”: you’re allowed to laugh at nothing in a “no value is better” world—even though that value itself was held to be better), to far-left political agendas that in effect “equalized poverty,” to egalitarian “no judgment” attitudes that refused to see any “higher” or “better” views at all (even though its own view was judged “higher” and “better” than all the others), to modes of entertainment that everywhere eulogized egalitarian flatland, to a denial of all growth hierarchies by confusing them with dominator hierarchies (which effectively crushed all routes to actual growth in any systems anywhere), to the media’s sense of egalitarian “fairness” that ended up trying to give equal time to every possible, no matter how factually idiotic, alternative viewpoint (such as Holocaust deniers), to echo-chambered social media where “pleasant lies” and “reassuring falsehoods” were the standard currency (and which were educating kids daily on how to lie and fake the truth socially). It saturated the leading-edge of evolution itself, throwing it into a performative contradiction and a widespread, explicit or implicit, aperspectival madness that was soon driven by nihilism and narcissism and a whole post-truth culture, which even invaded the Internet and bent it profoundly. That brokenness perfused the entire information grid of the overall culture itself—exactly the type of profound and extensive impact you expect a leading-edge (healthy or unhealthy) to have. 

It has indeed become the defining issue of our century, because not a single other issue can be directly and effectively addressed if there is no compass point of accessible truth to guide action in the first place. In this catastrophic wasteland, the world is now suspended. 

Ken Wilber, a visionary thinker of inspired genius, is the developer of an integral “theory of everything” embracing the truths of all the world’s great traditions. He is the author of over twenty books, including A Brief History of Everything; Grace and Grit; Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; Boomeritis; and Religion of Tomorrow—spanning the genres from full-length scholarly works to popular introductions, from essays to daily journals, from personal memoir to fiction. Wilber´s Integral Approach, a radical theory that helps us make sense of our world by including as many perspectives as possible, has vast applications, in areas from business to medicine, psychology to ethics, politics to religion, art to education, sexuality to personal relationships. In 2000, he founded Integral Institute, a think-tank for studying issues of science and society, with outreach through local and online communities such as Integral Education Network, Integral Training, and Integral Spiritual Center. In 2007 Wilber co-founded Integral Life, a social media-hub dedicated to sharing the integral vision with the worldwide community, as well as documenting and catalyzing the progress of the integral movement.

His writings have been translated into over twenty languages. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

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