After what they claim was much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year for 2016 was ‘…post-truth’. The adjective was defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. In the intervening years, we have become fully conversant with the concept courtesy of the politics, pronouncements, and linguistic gymnastics of politicians such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnston, Jair Bolsonaro or Marine Le Pen. The most recent and most vicious of such politicians is, of course Vladimir Putin. There are many more such mis-leaders, including our own Maltese editions. In this, they have joined the well-established very marginal links between advertising and marketing and anything resembling the truth. The advent of social media has propelled ‘post-truth’ to almost stratospheric dimensions. Facts, truth, science are now but optional items in public and even private conversation. Those principles that all of us who attended an everyday school were urged to respect and uphold – reason and reasoning, deliberation and judgment, honesty and integrity...
