• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, September 2, 2025

We in the Western world are getting used to playing fast and loose with the truth. There is so much that is false around us -- in our politics, in our media, in our day-to-day conversations -- that it’s just too exhausting to hold everything to a burden of truth. Even the skeptical amongst us no longer have the cognitive bandwidth to keep searching for credible proof.

This is by design. Somewhere in the past four decades, politicians and society’s power brokers have discovered that by pandering to beliefs rather than trading in facts, you can bend the truth to your will. Those who seek power and influence have struck paydirt in falsehoods.

In a cover story last summer in The Atlantic, journalist Anne Applebaum explains the method in the madness: “This tactic—the so-called fire hose of falsehoods—ultimately produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you just can’t know? If you don’t know what happened, you’re not likely to join a great movement for democracy, or to listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you are not going to participate in any politics at all.”

As Applebaum points out, we have become a society of nihilists. We are too tired to look for evidence of meaning. There is simply too much garbage to shovel through to find it. We are pummeled by wave after wave of misinformation, struggling to keep our heads above the rising waters by clinging to the life preserver of our own beliefs. In the process, we run the risk of those beliefs becoming further and further disconnected from reality, whatever that might be. The cogs of our sense-making machinery have become clogged with crap.

This reverses a consistent societal trend towards the truth that has been happening for the past several centuries. Since the Enlightenment of the 18^th century, we have held reason and science as the compass points of our true north. These twin ideals were buttressed by our institutions, including our media outlets. Their goal was to spread knowledge.

It’s no coincidence that journalism flourished during the Enlightenment. Freedom of the press was constitutionally enshrined to ensure journalists had both the right and the obligation to speak the truth.

That was then. This is now. In the U.S., institutions, including media, universities and even museums, are being overtly threatened if they don’t participate in the willful obfuscation of objectivity that is coming from the White House. NPR and PBS, two of the most reliable news sources according to the Ad Fontes media bias chart, have been defunded by the federal government. Social media feeds are awash with AI slop. In a sea of misinformation, the truth becomes impossible to find. And, for our own sanity,  we have had to learn to stop caring about this issue.

But here’s the thing about the truth: It gives us an unarguable common ground. It is consistent and independent from individual belief and perspective. As longtime senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” 

When you trade in falsehoods, the ground is consistently shifting below your feet. The story is constantly changing to match the current situation and the desired outcome. There are no bearings to navigate by. Everyone has their own compass, and they’re all pointing in different directions.

The path the world is currently traveling is troubling in a number of ways. But perhaps the most troubling is, it simply isn’t sustainable. Sooner or later in this sea of deliberate chaos, credibility is going to be required to convince enough people to do something they may not want to do. And if you have consistently traded away your credibility by battling the truth, good luck getting anyone to believe you.