EXPIRES: 1995

WRITTEN: 1967

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

Hannah Arendt

'Truth and Politics,' in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 257

Written: 1967

Addressed to: within a generation

Source: 'Truth and Politics

Author: Hannah Arendt

Category: Governance & Power

Annotation

Arendt wrote this during Vietnam-era credibility crises, but her prediction reached beyond any single episode. She warned that systematic political dishonesty would not merely produce a credulous public, but destroy the cognitive capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood at all — a prediction that reads as uncannily specific in the age of post-truth politics and information warfare.

What Actually Happened

The Oxford English Dictionary named 'post-truth' its 2016 word of the year. Arendt's essay became one of the most-cited political philosophy texts of the 2016–2020 period.

#truth#politics#propaganda#epistemology#disinformation

2000

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

Francis Fukuyama

2000

This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal. Reaction to last summer's disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.

National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Otto Kerner, chair)

2005

The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.

Paul A. Samuelson