Post-Truth is Pre-Fascism
Notes, Quotes, and Paraphrases from On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century - Timothy Snyder
“You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case…As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes:
1) Open hostility to verifiable reality.
Presenting Inventions and lies as if they were facts.
The “Great Leader” lies frequently and without reason. Usually by such volume that journalists, authors, and others, can’t adequately combat these falsehoods quickly enough, nor will the people listen to such refutations.
See Brandolini’s Principle of Refutation
The amount of energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
Or put simply, it would take hours to debunk the lies that President Trump speaks in an hour, let alone a day, or a week.
2) Shamanistic Incantations or Memes
Memes, or the idea of a repeated and replicating idea, slogan, or catchphrase, becomes essential to the breakdown of truth.
(The word meme predates the funny cat picture definition by at least 50 years, being used by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene in 1976 to describe repeated ideas)
Examples include “Making America Great Again”, “America First”, “DOGE is saving money”, “Criticizers of Trump have Trump Derangement Syndrome”, and other blatant lies that are repeated ad nauseam until accepted as truth.
3) The Open Embrace of Contradiction
At some point, the followers of the new order must give up objective truth and accept every lie, despite its contradiction. Orwell spoke of “doublethink”.
Examples include:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
or more aptly
Billionaires are cutting my taxes
DOGE is spending millions per day but saving me money
Feeding starving people is immoral and corrupt
Trump lies frequently, has affairs with porn stars, brags about his sexual immorality and is a Godly, family man
Accepting such nonsense requires the complete abandonment of reason.
4) Misplaced Faith
The final step comes when all faith is placed in the “Great Leader” despite experience, reason, or sense. The leader begins to self-deify or present himself as a sort of god and the people follow.
“I alone can fix it.”
“Christians, get out and vote, just this time. “You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
“I will fight for you with every breath in my body - and I will never, ever let you down.”
Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism.
They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.