Propaganda and the Obsolescence of Truth

Ever since the campaign for the 2024 presidential election got into full swing, one of my favorite hobbies has been collecting the propaganda mail that the Republican Party has been sending out. I live in Georgia, which is now a particularly important swing state, so the Republican party has been putting in a lot of effort to motivate their voter base in the state. There’s a lot you can learn about a candidate and the party they run for by analyzing the propaganda they make, and trust me, the anti-Kamala propaganda is particularly informative. Of course, the most consistent theme of Republican propaganda is that truth doesn’t matter. Join me, if you would, on a journey through electoral propaganda, for at the end of the rainbow there lies an unerring truth about truth.

My collection of Republican propaganda mail began with a rather simple piece about the price of gasoline. This piece of propaganda, one of the first mail propaganda designs to be sent out after Kamala Harris was given the Democratic candidacy, claims that gas prices used to be low because of Trump’s presidency. Gas prices have always been, to put it kindly, an interesting metric to judge the quality of a president on, mostly because of how little overlap there is between the policy prescriptions of a given president and the price of gas. The government doesn’t have that much influence over gas prices, and what influence it does have is more in the hands of congress than the president. The price of filling up your tank is much more dependent on the economy at large, and the business practices of oil tycoons. 

Regardless, the piece cites a headline from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution which reads “Metro Atlanta gas prices drop below $1.50/gallon.” I can verify that this was a real article, no fictionalization there. However, there’s a sort of lying by omission that happens here. While the piece does name the exact date this article was published, it does not consider, nor does it expect the reader to do so, any extenuating circumstances that might have been the actual cause of gas prices being so low. You see, this news article was published on March 28, 2020. Now, just a little logic/memory test for you, can you think of any major global events that would have been going on around March 2020 that would cause low gas prices?

In case you can’t remember, March 2020 was when COVID-19 lockdowns started going into effect around the globe. Schools and universities were canceling, businesses were shutting down, people were staying at home, and trade was hitting record lows. People weren’t driving their cars because they were quarantining, so demand for gasoline was dropping drastically. Call back your knowledge from high school economics for me, and ask yourself, “what happens when demand decreases?” The answer is, obviously, that prices decrease with it. 

The second claim made by the piece is that gas prices are at record highs, and that this is because of Kamala Harris. Here, we have a few very funny inconsistencies. The first one is the source of this claim, an article stating that gas prices are at an all time high of $4.50 per gallon… from 2022. This is an odd claim to make in a propaganda piece from 2024, especially since gas prices dropped by about $1.50 between then and now, but we can ignore that. Propaganda doesn’t rely much on relevancy, after all. 

As I said earlier, the president has very little influence over gas prices, but they do have *some* influence. You wanna know who has absolutely no influence on gas prices? The vice president, who, in this case, is Kamala Harris. I hate to break it to you, Republicans, but Kamala Harris does not decide what gas prices are. Furthermore, recall the detail that the article they cite is from 2022. It is true that gas prices were at record highs around that time period, but what this piece neglects to mention is that Democrats introduced legislation to handle it, that being the Gas Price Gouging Prevention Act. This bill would give the FTC expanded authority to investigate and penalize oil and gas companies for price gouging. When this bill made it to the House of Representatives floor, it passed with 217 yeas to 207 nays. Of the 217 votes to pass the bill, not a single one of them was a Republican. Soon after, the bill failed to make it to a Senate vote because, once again, no Republicans supported it. 

So yes, gas prices were at record highs, but one party was actively attempting to solve the problem, and the other was actively working to keep them from doing so. It doesn’t seem like Republicans are all that concerned with gas prices after all.

The second piece I collected discusses one of the most contentious political issues of the past eight years, that being immigration. According to this piece, 514,000 illegal immigrants live in the state of Georgia, and Georgians spend $3 billion in taxes on their housing, healthcare, “and more.” As far as I can tell, these numbers are fairly accurate. At first glance, they seem to come from dubious sources, namely the Federation for American Immigration Reform, but through my investigation I wasn’t able to find much reason to believe these numbers are inaccurate.

However, what I was able to find with a cursory Google search was a 2024 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that measures how much illegal immigrants pay in taxes. Plot twist for the Republicans, undocumented immigrants aren’t just leeches on the state, they do pay taxes, particularly sales, income, and property taxes. 

The findings of this report indicate that “[u]ndocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.” What’s more, these undocumented immigrants pay an average of $8,889 per person. Even more interesting is that the report found that in 40 out of 50 states, “undocumented immigrants pay higher state and local tax rates than the top 1 percent of households living within their borders.” Isn’t that some crazy data? Isn’t it interesting that undocumented immigrants, in most cases, pay more in taxes than the average American despite seeing much less of the benefits from them? Of course, this is information the propaganda, as well as Republican politicians, pundits, and voters, ignores, because it would be inconvenient. Suddenly that $3 billion number doesn’t seem so unfair, considering that undocumented immigrants pay more in taxes than the people complaining about them.

This next piece is pretty funny. After Tim Walz was chosen as Kamala Harris’s running mate, he started popping off in the public eye, becoming incredibly loved in a very short period of time. Unlike many politicians, Walz has a very genuine humanity to his vibe, which lots of people resonate with. This was made stronger with his blunt “weird” comments, rightfully pointing out just how odd and inhuman his Republican opponents are. With Republicans struggling to get a foothold with their incredibly unpopular VP choice, JD Vance, the party was desperate to poke holes in Walz’s armor wherever they could manage. 

What weakness did they find? Well, this piece proves that Walz isn’t a friend of the people because… he pushed legislation to add a 95% tax on Zyn pouches. You have to wonder how little Republicans have on a guy when the only solid criticism they have of him is that he raised taxes for an addictive substance. This flier cites an article from The Daily Caller, a right wing news organization founded by Tucker Carlson. “Tim Walz Went To War On Zyn While Pushing Free Needles, Legalizing Pot,” says this headline.

There’s not much in the way of facts to “debunk” in this article, this is mostly a game of arguments and rhetoric, a game that doesn’t exactly end up in favor of Republicans. You see, Tim Walz isn’t waging a “war” against Zyn, he was amending Minnesota’s Tobacco Tax Law so that all tobacco-free nicotine products face a 95% tax rate. This isn’t really a big thing to get him on, even with the supposed hypocrisy of legalizing marijuana while pushing taxes on tobacco. I feel like this shouldn’t be hard to understand, but there’s nothing hypocritical about believing marijuana should be legal and also that people should be discouraged from buying tobacco-free nicotine products, especially considering that nicotine is exponentially worse for your health, and tobacco-free products like vapes and Zyns are incredibly popular among minors. Nicotine companies have been targeting young people for decades, even before vapes existed. The strategy is to hook them while they’re young so you have a lifelong customer. With business practices like that, the tobacco industry is lucky that the government doesn’t execute all the CEO’s and ban tobacco entirely. I feel like a 95% tax rate to discourage prospective customers is getting off lightly.

How about that second claim? The one about “pushing free needles?” Well as it turns out, that’s not exactly a “gotcha” either. The bill this article references was intended to make it easier for heroin addicts to access harm reduction measures, including sterile needles and safe locations to dispose of used needles. This would also include free HIV testing, temporary housing, and access to resources to help people stop their addiction. What exactly is the problem with this? If the problem is free, sterile needles, then the alternative is that drug addicts use dirty needles, get AIDS, and die. People dying, I’m sure you’d agree, is not good. It’s also good that people who may have HIV/AIDS can be tested for free and receive treatment for it. I’d also go so far as to make the apparently controversial take that if people are addicted to drugs, then it would be a good thing to help them not be addicted to drugs, in order to make them a more functional, productive, and most importantly healthier member of society. 

Of course, this isn’t what the piece wants you to think. The implication of this headline is that Tim Walz wants to ban tobacco while giving everybody and their mom free heroin, which flatly isn’t true. The only reason you would be against that bill is if you are stupid, or are just evil and think that all drug addicts should die painfully, which is what most Republican politicians believe. 

I have over a dozen other pieces of mail propaganda, but for the sake of brevity I’ll only go over one last flier. This one’s a real gish gallop, so I’ll try to keep this debunk-athon short and sweet. 

Under the title “Donald Trump’s common sense agenda,” we find a list of nine bullet points, starting with “eliminate taxes on Social Security for seniors.” What this actually means is “get rid of Social Security entirely because that’s been one of the Republican Party’s biggest goals for over twenty years.” Oh, and by the way, if Social Security ends up getting eliminated, don’t expect to get back any of those tax dollars you spent on it. 

Next is “let the voters in each state decide their own abortion policies,” instead of, you know, letting voters decide the abortion policy in their own country. As we all know, the federal government saying “if you want to make a decision about your life and healthcare then that’s okay” is much more tyrannical than a state government saying “you should never ever be allowed to make this health decision, and if you do, we will either kill you or throw you in jail.”

Third is border stuff, which I won’t waste time with since we’ve already covered that. Four is “rebuild our cities,” which I would respond with: “rebuild from what?” This almost certainly comes from the belief that BLM riots destroyed cities or whatever, which you can easily disprove by, you know, going to these cities, but Republican voters would never do that because black people scare them.

Fifth is “keep violent criminals off the streets,” which is intended to be a dig at the whole “defund the police” thing but I would encourage Republican voters to look at crime statistics. According to literally every reliable data source, violent crime has plummeted since the 1990’s, and is still on a downward trend. I would also tell the Republicans concerned about criminals that the fire is coming from inside the house. Their main man Donald Trump just got convicted of thirty-eight felonies. He was very close friends with Epstein, and unsealed court documents from the Epstein trial describe Donald Trump forcing two underage girls to have sex with each other for his own pleasure. They can talk about crime all they want, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re voting for a rapist pedophile.

At number six, we have “keep men out of women’s sports and protect women’s scholarships by reversing the Biden/Harris rewrite of Title IX.” First of all, none of these people give a fuck about women’s sports, this is just disingenuous bullshit. Secondly, you’ll notice that whenever these people talk about trans women dominating sports, they’re always quoting some butthurt loser who got ninth place in a running competition who’s mad that a trans woman got eighth place, even when a cis woman is still in first. This is a stupid conversation and I refuse to waste time on it.

Seven says “unleash American energy production to lower gas prices and inflation.” First, energy production has nothing to do with inflation. Second, inflation is down. Third, most American oil imports are done to refine it and sell it at a higher profit, not to get energy, because we already make enough energy for ourselves. Fourth, you’ll notice that any bill on improving American energy production never involves becoming a leader in renewable energy production, an action that would not only boost the economy and give us an edge on the global market, but also make the environment cleaner. No, these bills will only tout more fracking and oil mining, because Republicans are all in the pockets of the oil industry.

Eight is “stop the out-of-control spending to end inflation.” Repeating myself, inflation is down to a healthy rate. 

Lastly, at number nine, we have “eliminate taxes on tips for tip-based workers.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with this proposal, but it’s an idea that only seems good at first glance. In reality, eliminating taxes on tips would do pretty much nothing at best, and be very harmful to the people it’s supposed to help at worst. PBS did a pretty good breakdown of this policy proposal. The vast majority of people working tip-based jobs have incomes so low that they aren’t even subject to income tax anyway. This policy can also have some unintended– at least nominally so– negative side effects. Cutting taxes on tips could potentially lead people to believe that since workers now keep the entirety of their tips, it would be okay to tip less. Furthermore, if the focus of the conversation shifts to having taxless tips, then “efforts to raise both tipped and untipped minimum wages may fall by the wayside.” Ending taxed tips could also encourage employers to lower their base wages. There are a variety of other problems with this, but I’ve wasted enough time on this topic, and would encourage you to read the PBS article here if you want to learn more.

As I mentioned, my collection of Republican mail propaganda is pretty expansive. I could sit here and write fifteen more pages debunking it all, but I’m sure that you get the point by now. Going any more into depth would be a waste of all of our time, and it would honestly be pretty repetitive. Now it’s time we shed our debunking coat and put on our philosophical thinking caps.

So, what’s the point? What’s the thesis? What’s my major? I didn’t go through the effort of collecting and curating a collection of dumbass Trump propaganda just for shits and giggles. The reason I felt it pertinent to go through the effort of debunking all of these propaganda pieces is because I wanted to show just how easy it is to do. It doesn’t require a degree in sociology or political science to explain why this propaganda is wrong. I was able to disprove half of this stuff with basic reasoning and critical thinking, and the other half I proved wrong with simple Google searches. If this kind of propaganda is so easy to disprove, why do people believe it?

Because the median voter is a braindead moron Because truth doesn’t exist anymore. I know that sounds incredibly nihilistic, but it’s true. Just a decade ago, if a presidential candidate told a half-truth, the news media would spend an entire week harassing them about it. Nowadays, a presidential candidate will shout the most blatant, easily falsifiable lies imaginable and nobody really comments on it, because they lie so often it’s impossible to debunk it all. Think about it like this: it only takes a few seconds to tell a lie that takes a few minutes to debunk. If your opponent is dedicated to lying, then they can tell a dozen more lies in the time it takes you to disprove the first one. It’s a battle you can’t win. 

Just look at the whole Springfield, Ohio story. One random person, who later went on to admit they lied and apologized, logged into Facebook one day and made up a story about Haitian immigrants eating their pets, and suddenly it was the talk of the nation for weeks straight. There was, and I cannot stress this enough, literally no evidence for this story, and yet a presidential candidate went on to parrot this completely made up story on national television and nearly incite a goddamn pogrom. Every single police officer in Springfield said that they had no reason to believe these stories were true, but that didn’t stop Republicans from shouting from the rooftops about how evil black people were stealing and eating dogs and cats. JD Vance straight up admitted in an interview that he knew the story was fake from the beginning, and that he didn’t care, but it had literally no measurable impact on the Trump campaign’s electability.

Something important to understand about truth is that it has no inherent power. Only power has power. Truth doesn’t have inherent value either. Truth only has as much power and value as we give it, and right now a solid quarter, if not more, of this country’s population couldn’t give less of a shit about truth. I hate the nihilist worldview, but I can’t deny that sometimes they’re onto something. Frederic Nietzsche said in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “life itself is will to power, nothing else matters.” In other words, things like morality and truth are meaningless, because only power matters. 

That sentiment is sneaking up to something true. I can almost get behind it, but I feel as if it’s missing some much needed nuance. I don’t wanna diss Nietzsche too much, cause he was a really smart guy, but sometimes his analysis feels a bit too simplistically defeatist. It doesn’t really lend well to a productive mindset. All that kind of thinking will do is encourage apathy. I mean, why bother being good, moral, and truthful if the only thing that matters is power?

 Michel Foucault spoke about truth and its relationship to power, and I feel his insight is a much more valuable way of understanding power. “Truth is not by nature free- nor error servile- its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.” Truth is not meaningless, as a nihilist might say, but it does not have any strength or value just by virtue of being true. Truth, like all things in politics, exists in the context of its relationship to power. Power influences truth. As we saw with those Republican mail ads, the truth is referenced when it is convenient. The greatest lies are those that are woven with a thread of truth. 

From the perspective of power, and those who hold it, truth is nothing but a tool, a means to an end. You use a tool when it’s appropriate and beneficial to use it. Just as you wouldn’t use a screwdriver to drive a nail, those in power wouldn’t use truth when misdirection is better suited for the job. Similarly, truth that is obfuscated by technicalities may sometimes be of more value than a lie, depending on the task at hand. “Truth does not do as much good in the world, as the appearance of it does evil,” so said Daniil Dankovsky François de La Rochefoucauld. I know I’m bombarding you with a lot of pretentious philosophical bullshit, but considering philosophers have spent millenia contemplating the meaning of truth, I think there’s no other topic more fitting of such a flurry of philosophizing.

Ever since Socrates, philosophers have asked what “truth” is, and there are thousands of years worth of answers to that question. I’m no philosopher, nor am I god, but I feel confident in one thing: the truth is obsolete. We’ve seen its increasing obsolescence for the past decade, and it’s finally starting to calcify. This isn’t the first time this has happened though. Propaganda campaigns have always relied on the disempowerment of truth. The power of propaganda doesn’t come from truth, and it never has. Propaganda is strong because of rhetoric. Truth is not convincing in and of itself, but the way someone speaks can be, and that’s what propaganda takes advantage of. It brushes the truth under the rug and fronts a mountain of arguments that seem reasonable to the untrained eye. 

What makes propaganda unique today is the difference in access to information. It’s easier now than at any point in all of history to find information. Websites like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive place the entire planet’s sum of knowledge in the palms of our hands. With so much information at our fingertips, one would think that it should be harder than ever before to spread propaganda, but that isn’t the case. Why? Because as easy as it is to find information, it’s even easier to stumble onto misinformation. In the wake of generative AI, we’re seeing the potential beginning of an information singularity, a time where misinformation is so easy to create and disseminate that truth becomes indistinguishable from untruth. In times like these, propaganda thrives like never before. 

Need proof? Just a few weeks prior to me writing this, a video went viral of a student of Tim Walz claiming that the hopeful vice president had molested him as a child. The catch is that the video was entirely fabricated, generated by AI and voiced over by some random guy who either chose to slander Walz, or had no problem doing so. People with keen eyes could notice the flaws in the video, but as quickly as AI technology is advancing, it won’t be too long before those flaws are gone and dealt with.

Mark my words, the destruction of truth will be one of the greatest political issues of our time, rivaled only by climate change and the second coming of fascism. Decades from now, assuming academia doesn’t collapse in on itself or get broken down by the state, political scientists, sociologists, and philosophers the world over will be writing think pieces about the death of the fact, and when that day comes, I will proudly announce: “get fucked idiots, I wrote about that topic before it was cool!” Not really… okay maybe I will but that’s beside the point. 

So, what is the point? Well, sadly, I don’t really know. Regardless if this “information singularity” actually happens, we’re going to eventually deal with the repercussions of the past eight years of political upheaval. In many ways, we already are. A quarter of the population of the United States lives in an entirely different universe from you and me. We may live in a world where truth is influenced by power, but they live in a world where truth is subsumed by it, one where truth straight up doesn’t exist, and I simply don’t know how to bridge that gap. I don’t know if anyone does. This is beyond what any reeducation is capable of solving. This problem is so large in scale, and tied into so many different institutions, from the media, to politics, to the internet, to the fundamental ways in which we communicate, the list goes on and on. We could just sit around and wait for all the Republicans to grow old, senile, and die alone in nursing homes, but that won’t solve the fundamental problem. Waiting for all the crazy people to die won’t fix what made them go crazy in the first place.

So the question we have to answer is “what is it that made them go crazy?” Capital. The answer is capital. You’re gonna have to forgive me for spewing my commie propaganda, but this mass hysteria didn’t sprout out of nowhere for no reason. It was curated by the capital class, for it is in their best interest to ensure that their hold over the means of production continues to expand while the proletariat they purchase the labor of lose their grasp on it. The world under capitalism revolves around class warfare. The modern battle of politics is the tale of the owning class trying to ensure their dominance over the rest of us. The capital class, who are educated enough to understand their interests and have the means to pursue them, will always work to protect their interests above all else. 

The capital class never takes action that does not actively benefit them, and they will do anything in their power to keep themselves on top. The way they keep themselves on top is by making sure the working class stay servile. How do you keep the working class servile? Well, you do that in a lot of ways, typically by sowing division among race or gender lines, but you also do it by making sure that your employees stay stupid. For a time, a highly educated proletariat seemed to benefit the ruling class, but it has a high risk of biting them in the ass because the proletariat might get smart enough to start becoming class conscious, and class consciousness is a luxury that keeps capital in power, but threatens their reign if the wrong people learn it.

So how do the capital owners of the world prevent their rule from being jeopardized? By supporting fascists. Fascists LOVE capital, and they LOVE the people who have it. Capital owners benefit from having fascists in power because it keeps the working class subdued. The Republican party is fully in the pocket of the capital class, and the capital class will continue to support them because Republican policy making serves as a shield between them and the proletariat. A shield isn’t enough, though. You need a sword as well. So what’s the capital class’s sword? The media.

The Republican party creates the policy that keeps capital in power, but we live in a democracy– nominally, at least. It isn’t enough to control a political party, you also have to convince the public that supporting this particular party is in their own interest, even when it isn’t. That’s what the job of the media is. They either convince you that it’s in your best interest to hand the capital class more power, or tell you that the only acceptable opposition is to advocate for the status quo. That’s one of the reasons why the Republicans are constantly shifting to the right, but Democrats hardly ever seem to shift leftward. The Democratic aligned media maintains the norm, preventing any extreme leftward movement except on maybe a few social issues, while right wing news organizations keep moving the overton window further and further to the right. 

This sounds conspiratorial, but you have to understand that this isn’t some crazy conspiracy theory, it’s just basic understanding of class interest and looking at the world around us. The capital class isn’t some shadowy cabal, like so many conspiracies would claim, it’s just CEOs, business owners, people of that ilk. These people all went to the same colleges, live in the same big cities, play golf in the same country clubs, and put their money in the same offshore banks. This isn’t a case of some evil, shadow government working behind the scenes, it’s just the logical endpoint of the power of capital. It’s what I said before: the capital class have the education to understand what is in their best interest, and the means to pursue them, so it is only rational to understand that they WILL pursue them. When almost all media is owned by a handful of people, you should expect that those people will take advantage of the power they have over the spread of information.

Oh yeah, in case you didn’t know, over 90% of media is owned by just six companies. That isn’t just news media by the way, it’s 90% of ALL media, owned by Viacom, News Corporation, Comcast, CBS, Time Warner, and Disney. Those six companies control the vast, vast majority of media in the United States. Of course they’re going to use it to further their class interest! That’s what got us here. The average person may be horribly under-informed about political issues, but that isn’t because being braindead is an inherent trait of the median voter. I don’t even think this is a problem with education. This problem is almost entirely the fault of a media industry that deliberately misinforms and misleads the citizenry. Because the media serves the interest of those who own it, news media will ignore many inconvenient issues, and when they do discuss such a topic they only do it in ways that frame it in the most positive way for them.

Capital interests are responsible for the obsolescence of truth, and those same interests are gladly ferrying fascism along in its wake. The world revolves around capital interests, and anything that happens is either because they allow it, because they want it, or in spite of them, in which case they actively work against it. 

The capital interests, though, aren’t working against the rise of fascism, they’re supporting it. They support it with donations to super PACs, with advertising, with plans of action, and dozens of other ways. Capitalism is an inherently authoritarian ideology, only instead of a government controlling your life, it’s a CEO. That’s why capitalism decays into fascism. It’s an inherent trait of those class interests. The only way to stop the current spread of fascism is to deal with capital, which I’m sure you can guess that describing the task as an uphill battle would be a severe understatement.

There are, as I see it, three most likely ways this shakes out. The worst case scenario is that the full weight of capital is put behind a fascist uprising, a few years pass, millions of people die, and then the fascist regime eventually burns out and collapses in on itself, which is how fascism always plays out. From that point, we either have a return to status quo and repeat the entirety of the past century a second time until another fascist regime rises, or people finally grow wise to the fact that capital is inherently evil and leads down a road to fascism, and some kind of anti-capitalist system is born from the ashes of millions of corpses.

The best case scenario is that we somehow nip the next fascist uprising in the bud, either by convincing capital owners that it isn’t in their best interests to support said uprising, or by pushing liberals to finally grow a fucking spine for once and be effective against the fascists. The hope, in that scenario, is that Marx was right when he said that the United States is capable of a peaceful transition to socialism. Considering Marx was right about most things, I think our odds aren’t too bad, even if the material conditions when he said that were very different from how things are now.

So let’s consider the situation we find ourselves in. As of this essay's release, the election is only four days away. Assuming Kamala Harris wins the presidency, and any coup attempts by Republicans fail, we’ve successfully bought ourselves four years. During those four years, the capital class and the fascists will continue to consolidate strength and resources, just as they did from 2020-2024. Although it’s highly unlikely that Trump will be able to run again, they will inevitably build a coalition around a new candidate. We have to make sure that we gather strength as well, and we gather strength by pushing Democrats left. 

Something we have to accept is that any Democratic presidency that doesn’t result in the imprisonment of half the Republican party is not a victory, it’s just kicking the can down the road. For a brief time, it seemed like something might actually be done to stop Republicans during the Biden administration. The January 6th commission, the convictions of Trump, these could have been major wins against fascism, but instead they just fizzled out into nothing because liberals are spineless cowards and are also in the pocket of capital interests.

So, we return to the fact that truth is dead in the water. How do we solve it? By abolishing capital. How do we do that? I have no clue. I can only speculate. The only thing I know is that this problem cannot be solved so long as we live in a bourgeois democracy. We can toss around ideas about laws against misinformation all day long, but how do you pass anti-misinformation laws that actually work, won’t be abused and misused by the ruling class, and won’t have any unintentional negative side effects, in a society where truth is viewed as worthless by half the voting population and nothing more than an optional tool to all the people in power? I’m trying my best not to fed-post, but the owning class controls everything, including truth, and we can’t pry truth out of their grasp without breaking a few fingers. 

Maybe there comes a point of no return, where beyond it truth cannot be saved without a cultural reset. Maybe we’re already beyond such a point. I’m not omniscient. I like to think of myself as an optimist, and I firmly believe that even if truth may be cold in the ground now, it can be brought back to life. I believe it’s possible that someday, truth can be given the power it needs to sustain itself, but that day isn’t today, and I’m not sure if I’ll live to see it.