What is truth?

Truth is what we know really happened, right?

The act of unfollowing someone on Twitter who thinks the current covid restrictions are deliberate Governmental erosion of our civil liberties (but who probably voted to put Priti Patel in the Home Office, excuse the stereotyping) got me thinking about truth.

Fact 1: it has been terrifying, over the past few years, to watch the opinions of some, freely disseminated on social media platforms, acquire the status of truth in the minds of so many. To watch the deliberate rewriting of what really happened.

Fact 2: it has been terrifying, over the past few years, to watch the success of the government of the ‘People’s Republic’ of China in convincing literally billions that freedom is a luxury which a stable society cannot afford, largely through internet censorship. To watch the deliberate rewriting of what really happened.

It was Democrat extremists who stormed the Capitol. Muslims are not being imprisoned and sterilised in China. There is nothing to choose between Trump’s and Xi Jinping’s reality, between Putin’s and Johnson’s. As soon as you allow your ideology to blur that line between opinion and truth, you align yourself with them. Can there be any future for political systems depending on informed consensus when so many are adept at hijacking the truth, and social media have eroded respect for peer reviewed journalism?

And what do we do about freedom of expression? There has long been a working consensus in Western democracies that there should be free sharing of information, yet some censorship. So where does that leave truth? Can it ever really exist somewhere in the middle, in a world without absolutes?

Pontius Pilate asked Christ what truth was. It’s an even better question these days.