The Oxford English Dictionary announced that “Post-truth” is their 2016 “Word of the Year.” The Economist this Fall claiming that we live in a post-truth society.
“It is interesting that the media, which flirts with untruths, and the academy, which never hesitates to replace absolutes by postmodern relativism, have come together to give our culture a new word,” said Ravi Zacharias. “Their explanation was not so much that they were coining a new word as that they were affirming a reality—a truth about the way we coddle the lie, the ultimate
self-defeating statement.”
self-defeating statement.”
Why was this chosen?
The concept of post-truth has been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries has seen a spike in frequency this year in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States. It has also become associated with a particular noun, in the phrase post-truth politics.
By Ravi Zacharias:-
Post-truth as a phenomenon is not new. If indeed “post-truth” is the new word of the year in our postmodern lexicon, we might well say that it all depends on what “is” means. Just as postmodern is neither post nor modern but existed in the first conversation at creation’s dawn—
“Has God spoken?”—so also post-truth is actually rebellion right from the beginning. That was the mother of all questions in search of anarchy. “Has God given us His word?” The answer to that question spelled life or death.
Examples:-
On our shores, the Guardian Australia’s Katharine Murphy put it this way: “We’ve been drifting, in increments, in the direction of post-truth, but the election of Trump is a headfirst pitch over the cliff.” (The Australian)
We are witnessing the results of a widespread trend, summed up by the epithet “post-truth politics”, that can be understood through studies of disinformation in Putin’s Russia. (The Business Standard)
The election of an American president who routinely lies and the success of Brexit after a campaign full of falsehoods suggests we’re in a post-truth world, writes Roy Greenslade for The Guardian. (The Albany Times-Union)
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