“The truth will set you free”, if you still believe in it

by Chris Chatteris SJ

There was a time when totalitarian propaganda was utopian. Vast posters of happy peasants, workers, and soldiers marching towards a brave new world were designed to be awe-inspiring and motivate the masses to sacrifice themselves for the collective and its future. If one cares to book a time-travel holiday, one can still experience this retro-Stalinist approach to political persuasion in North Korea!

As Anne Applebaum points out in her book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, the problem with this approach is that people can see the obvious discrepancy between the cutout characters in the posters and themselves, so it doesn’t really work. All those North Koreans waving frantically at the “Dear Leader” are probably doing so more out of fear than out of a conviction that they are on a glorious road to a proletarian paradise.

Post-totalitarian regimes, Applebaum argues, have moved on from such unsophisticated stuff. Propaganda today is altogether more cynical. Rather than being stirring, inspiring and ideological, it aims at being cynical, depressing and apolitical. It works to convince people that there’s no point in getting excited about the possibility of a better future based on a superior political system. Rather, just get on with making a living and cultivating one’s private life and leave the politics to the powerful technocrats. 

It’s an implicit social contract – in exchange for being apolitical, the state will look after your security and ensure a modest but steady increase in your material well-being.

For those who might be inclined to be curious and even critical, the message is that the search for truth, like resistance, is futile. The most effective way this message is conveyed is through the ‘firehose of falsehoods’. When something embarrassing happens, the regime’s propaganda apparatus pumps out a whole slew of possible explanations designed not only to confuse the people but also to force them to the post-truth conclusion that there is no such thing as truth or that if there is, it’s impossible to find.

If, for example, a journalist who is critical of the government is shot dead in the street, it is suggested that she may have been the victim of a jealous lover or that her work had brought her too close to violent members of the criminal underworld, or that she staged the shooting herself to commit suicide in a way that would discredit the state. And so on. It works. We see it in the passive and depoliticised population of a society like Russia. 

But we also see signs of it in the jaded, postmodern cynicism that is not uncommon today in traditionally democratic societies. The taste for algorithm-driven conspiracy theories is a straw in the wind. Democratic societies’ reticence to regulate social media that distort facts and invent ‘alternative facts’ (‘lies’ in old speak) threatens to undermine the democratic project, for the search for truth always underpins the struggle for democracy.

This must include the truth of history. According to Marx, ‘If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded’. I worry when I note how students are emerging from secondary and even tertiary education with such a poor grasp of history that Marx’s dictum describes them well. 

Pope Francis’ recent short letter on the importance of knowing our history is good background reading for an ‘examen’ of our position on truth and the possibility of finding it in the postmodern, post-truth air we breathe.