2023年04月21日
Post-Truth: Some fake news lasts for ever
「真実を超えるもの」
それは、人間の創造性。人は物語を創作し、それを信じることを力としてきた。それが、ただに都合のいい考えでも。
269: Russian nationalists can excuse this lie by arguing that it served a higher truth.
271: China itself has long denied that Tibet ever existed as an independent country. British settlement in Australia was justified by the legal doctrine of terra nullius (nobody's land), which effectively erased 50,000 years of Aboriginal history.
The post-truth species
In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions.
272: When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month - that's fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years - that's a religion.
276: In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that 'The most fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.'
281: If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.
Scholars throughout history faced this dilemma: do they serve power or truth? Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same story, or should they let people knew the truth even at the price of disunity? The most powerful scholarly establishments - whether of Christian priests, Confucian mandarins or communist ideologues - placed unity above truth. That's why they were so powerful.
