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Post Truth Quotes

Browse 19 quotes about Post Truth.

Post Truth Quotes

“Instead of speaking of beliefs, one must actually speak of truths, and that these truths were themselves products of the imagination. We are not creating a false idea of things. It is the truth of things that through the centuries has been so oddly constituted. Far from being the most simple realistic experience, truth is the most historical. There was a time when poets and historians invented royal dynasties all of a piece, complete with the name of each potentate and his genealogy. They were not forgers, nor were they acting in bad faith. They were simply following what was, at the time, the normal way of arriving at the truth. [...] I do not at all mean to say that the imagination will bring future truths to light and that it should reign; I mean, rather, that truths are already products of the imagination and that the imagination has always governed. It is imagination that rules, not reality, reason, or the ongoing work of the negative.”

FactsTruthBeliefImaginationFictionBeliefsFactFake NewsPost TruthFactish
Book:Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?
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“Expanding the competitions’ “dirty bike” or ‘dirty ball” corruption reveals a mirror of society. If politicians deviate from their honest cause into bribery, if art turns into a battle of greed or consumerism, and truth becomes post-truth, the integrity erodes desperately, values are sacrificed at the altar of vainglory, and the moral compass is in a complete mess. (“The dirty bike")”

TruthGreedCorruptionConsumerismBriberyPost TruthVaingloryThe Dirty BikeDirty BallDirty Bike
Author:Erik Pevernagie
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“Let us, thusly, embrace the assumption that to each advocate of a respective paradigm within his respective bubble, the phenomenological gaps between himself and those in neighboring bubbles are insurmountable. The resident of a given bubble has become so inured to the echoes of his own ‘truth’ as to abandon all terms of commonality with the ‘truths’ of others outside his bubble. The internal terms, concepts, definitions and assumptions underlying each paradigm are different and incommensurate with those of their external counterparts. And so, to debate them would be tantamount to speaking through one another without much mutual understanding. In their communities, they speak different words, abide by different sets of logic, axioms and propositions from those of other communities; they, thusly, do not understand the terminology upholding other paradigms beside their own, and many attempts at translation have become lost in circular discourse for there exists no equivalency of terms. Thus, any gaps between bubbles of paradigm are beyond traversal; all arguments between them remain perplexing and irreconcilable. There, then, evolves, among them, a strong tendency to seek out information that only serves to confirm their own biases, and, in the process, to otherize any alien paradigms as hotbeds of disinformation.”

ParadigmPostmodernismEpistemologyPhenomenologyConfirmation BiasPost TruthTheory Of KnowledgeEcho ChamberInsularityInformation BubblesPlurality Of Truth
Author:Ashim Shanker
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“A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

Totalitarianism1968Post TruthTotalitarian MovementPolitical Lies
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“The most striking difference between the ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. In other words, one destroyed the dignity of human thought whereas the others destroy the dignity of human action. The old manipulators of logic were the concern of the philosopher, whereas the modern manipulators of facts stand in the way of the historian. For history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility—based upon the fact that it is enacted by men and therefore can be understood by men—is in danger, whenever facts are no longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused to prove this or that opinion.”

HistoryIdeologyCommunismMarxismTotalitarianism1968AntisemitismHistoriansPost TruthRace TheoryPost FactualReality ControlSophism
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“In other words, if a patent forgery like the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is believed by so many people that it can become the text of a whole political movement, the task of the historian is no longer to discover a forgery. Certainly it is not to invent explanations which dismiss the chief political and historical facts of the matter: that the forgery is being believed. This fact is more important than the (historically speaking, secondary) circumstance that it is a forgery.”

Fake News1968ForgeryPost TruthProtocols Of The Elders Of Zion
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“The mob believes everything it is told, provided only that it be repeated over and over. Provided too that its passions, hatreds, fears are catered to. Nor need one try to stay within the limits of plausibility: on the contrary, the grosser, the bigger, the cruder the lie, the more readily is it believed and followed. Nor is there any need to avoid contradictions: the mob never notices; needless to pretend to correlate what is said to some with what is said to others: each person or group believes only what he is told, not what anyone else is told; needless to strive for coherence: the mob has no memory; needless to pretend to any truth: the mob is radically incapable of perceiving it: the mob can never comprehend that its own interests are what is at stake.”

Propaganda1945Post TruthMob MentalityBig LieOrwellianismRule By Fear
Book:Réflexions sur le mensonge
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“Events specially staged to demonstrate the reality of that which doesn’t exist stand out in the particular detail in which they are described. No one really knows, for example, whether the harvests reported in Stalin’s or Brezhnev’s Russia were ever actually reaped, but the fact that the number of tilled hectares or tons of milled grain was always reported down to the tenth of a percent gave these simulacra the character of hyperreality. [...] In this sense, the ideology was accurate—it was describing itself. And any reality that differed from the ideology simply ceased to exist—it was replaced by hyperreality, which trumpeted its existence by newspaper and loudspeaker and was much more tangible and reliable than anything else. In the Soviet land, “fairy tale became fact,” as in that American paragon of hyperreality, Disneyland, where reality itself is designed as a “land of imagination.”

TruthSocialismCommunismPostmodernismSoviet RussiaPost TruthHyperreality
Book:After the Future
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“It is true that those of us who have political experience could wrestle for power just as any other politician. But we have no time; we have more important things to do. And there is no doubt that the knowledge we hold to be sacred would be lost in the process. To acquire power, millions of people have to be fed illusions. This too is true: Lenin won over millions of Russian peasants, without whom the Russian Revolution would have been impossible, with a slogan which was at variance with the basic collective tendencies of the Russian party. The slogan was: "Take the land of the large land-owners. It is to be your individual property." And the peasants followed. They would not have offered their allegiance if they had been told in 1917 that this land would one day be collectivized. The truth of this is attested to by the bitter fight for the collectivization of Russian agriculture around 1930. In social life there are degrees of power and degrees of falsity. The more the masses of people adhere to truth, the less power-mongering there will be; the more imbued with irrational illusions the masses of people are, the more widespread and brutal individual power-mongering will be.”

Masses1969Power PoliticsPost TruthOctober RevolutionCollectivization
Book:The Mass Psychology of Fascism
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“Melting Pot: Litani untuk Tantangan Tiga Jurang (Intertekstual — Neo-Sufistik Digitalism) I Di tepi, dua jurang saling membelai saling melukai— satu gelap seperti malam sebelum nama Tuhan disebut, satu berderak seperti server yang lupa bahwa ia sedang sekarat. Aku berdiri di antara keduanya, akar menancap dalam retakan; akar itu mengirim bisikan ke tulang, lalu sinyal ke motherboard. Di sinilah Agustinus menunduk dan Nietzsche tersenyum: yang satu berdoa agar kesunyian kembali bermakna, yang lain mengangkat palu untuk memahat makna dari kekosongan. Sementara Camus mengetuk jarinya pelan pada kaca realitas, menanyakan: apakah kita memilih untuk terus menanti jawaban, atau memilih absurditas sebagai lampu penerang jalan? Aku menolak belas kasihan orang lain; lebih baik jadi pohon yang berdiri—rentan, bengkok, keras kepala— atau jadi menara yang menuntun doa seperti gelombang radio. Gapura? Ya, gapura juga, tempat orang lewat tanpa tahu alamat tinggalnya. Di tiap gerbang aku melihat rumah ibu: bocor, berderit, rapuh, setia menunggu. Kerinduan menetes, paket data bocor, hujan yang mengunduh rindu dalam format .wav. II Di dalam kabel di bawah tanah, ada lagu yang tak pernah diindeks: ritme akar yang seperti mantra, glitch yang bergumam seperti zikir. Di frekuensi itu, domba-domba trauma berbisik—tidak hening, hanya tergeser: jeritan yang kita bungkus dengan pekerjaan, selfie, dan janji-janji kecil. Ada Lecter di kursi bayanganku, berbisik: "Kembalilah ke ladang yang kau tinggalkan, Clarice." Bukan untuk menghakimi, tapi untuk menunjukkan bahwa luka tak akan mati bila kau tak pulang hari ini. Kesedihan tidak berwujud satu format; ia multi-protokol: kadang menjadi bug, kadang menjadi palimpsest doa. Aku rooted—akarku telah di-root oleh sejarah—tapi aku masih bisa reboot rasa. Namun reboot tidak membersihkan semua log: beberapa pesan terus menunggu status "read". Dan lelaki perkasa dalam mimpiku? Ia terbang, punggungnya kuda ego—sebuah patch tanpa dokumentasi, meninggalkan jejak yang menjadi gema di sumur-sumur batin. III Maka aku merespon dengan sebuah litani yang terprogram rapi: buka—hapus—simpan—tutup—ulang—(echo)… Suara itu bukan dengung mesin belaka dan bukan pula doa; ia adalah bahasa ketiga: posthuman yang masih menaruh tempat untuk sebatang lilin. Di sini Tuhan jadi kecil—huruf kecil di tengah kode—lilin meleleh yang gagal dirender, tetapi cahayanya cukup untuk membaca peta luka. Kita menerima bahwa kebenaran kini adalah bayang-bayang: ada yang memilih kebenaran yang berulang (post-truth), ada yang memilih kebenaran yang menengok ke belakang (tradisi), ada pula yang membangun kebenaran di atas logikanya sendiri (eksistensi). Puisi ditulis tidak untuk menyelesaikan perdebatan; ia lebih memilih ruang: sebuah melting pot di mana akar, kabel, doa, dan error menjadi satu jamuan. Di akhir perjalanan, aku tidak menyuruhmu percaya— aku hanya mengundangmu pulang: ke gerbang ibu, ke terminal di bawah tanah, ke api kecil yang tak henti berkedip. Datanglah dengan domba-dombamu yang belum berhenti menjerit; biarkan mereka mengajar kita cara bernyanyi lagi— bukan lagu yang sama, tetapi lagu yang baru, gelap, dan setia. Di sana, di ambang ketiga jurang yang menantang itu, aku menyalakan sebatang lilin sendirian: sebuah cahaya yang tak menuntut pencerahan, hanya sedikit terang yang cukup agar induk akar bisa menemukan anak-anak akar yang kehilangan pijakan, dan agar bug-bug bisa belajar berdoa. November 2025”

PuisiPost TruthSintesisEntitas IntertekstualOrganisme Hidup
Author:Titon Rahmawan
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“Totalitarian propaganda perfects the techniques of mass propaganda, but it neither invents them nor originates their themes. These were prepared for them by fifty years of imperialism and disintegration of the nation-state, when the mob entered the scene of European politics. Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care or dare to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption.”

PropagandaImperialismTotalitarianismFake News1969Post TruthTotalitarian MovementTotalitarian Propaganda
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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