A Paradox: Truth in Post-Truth
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The nature of a paradox, using apparent contradiction to elucidate previously unrecognized truth, makes it an interesting tool for combating rhetoric that, as post-truth rhetoric seems to, isn’t in accord with a consistent nor cohesive sense of truth. Paradoxes can be said to reveal the way in which meaning is created through language use, and new interpretative understandings of language, that appear contradictory initially, but, after further consideration, bring-to-light previously unrecognized meanings. However, paradoxes also reveal the way in which the conventions of language, and the logic language reflects, is capable of canceling meaning, and asks reader’s to read, or see, past this. Therefore, paradoxes are uniquely experiential literary and rhetorical tools, requiring interpretive work that calls into question how meaning is created and perpetuated through the structures, language in this case, within which it exists, that can reframe the way in which we think about knowledge’s contextually bound nature.
The post-truth paradox is experiential in the same way. The act of recognizing truth within post-truth is an interpretative one of reading through this binary, so to speak, to see the way in which the fiction of post-truth is intended to reveal the existence of meaning and truth despite political ignorance of fact, which should inform the way in which we construct truth. In other words, the truthfulness of “we live in a post-truth world” is meaningfully ironic. As a tool for combating post-truth rhetoric, the post-truth paradox brings awareness to the way in which fact and truth have been disregarded in post-truth rhetoric, but continues to exist regardless, through irony.
Hannah Arendt, in her “Lying in Politics,” makes a similar claim about the nature of fact and truth within a context wherein the political concealment of facts, that are in opposition to a certain agenda, is readily practiced:
What these problem-solvers have in common with down-to-earth liars is the attempt to get rid of facts and the confidence that this should be possible because of the inherent contingency of facts…as though a fact is safely removed from the world if only enough people believe in its nonexistence…In the political domain, such destruction would have to be wholesale. (12-13)
Arendt, throughout “Lying in Politics,” attempts to elucidate a kind of intellectual and political obfuscation of fact that happens through different means, and within a different political context in America, the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers, but her final claims about the impossibility of destroying fact, unless belief in a fact’s nonexistence is wholesale, rings true within the “post-truth” context, as well. The post-truth paradox very similarly reveals how truth and fact continue to exist as long as people are capable of seeing through such obfuscation for the truth lingering beneath it, which elucidates the fact that, for the post-truth paradox to be rhetorically meaningful, its audience must be capable of interpreting it as paradoxical.
In light of Trump’s specific rhetorical style, the post-truth paradox, in contrast, requires critical and intellectual work from its audience, and suggests a need for the audience’s of post-truth rhetoric to participate in a similar kind of critical and intellectual analysis. In this way, the post-truth paradox can be thought of as a methodology for critique, and a subtle call to interpretive and critical action. The effectiveness of the post-truth paradox, then, relies almost solely on its audiences’ understanding of its irony, and, because of the way in which post-truth rhetoric, at least as it is exemplified by Trump on Twitter and in the rhetorical use of fake news, has deeply polarized its audience to the point where each’s understanding of the truth is irreconcilable with the other. Therefore, the post-truth paradox fails to bridge the gap in discourse it reveals—the gap between those that recognize "post-truth" as an inherently paradoxical rhetorical device to reveal the active concealment of truth, in contemporary political rhetoric, and those who don't interpret "post-truth" as such, or choose to ignore it. This is why the post-truth paradox, alone, is ultimately an ineffective means for changing the minds of those who are susceptible to post-truth rhetoric. Paradox requires interpretive engagement, and often, this case included, offers contextually bound meaning, which then requires the ability to critically interrogate the context a paradox is engaging with in order to make meaning of it. Ultimately, then, this paradox doesn't reveal the same meaning I've identified with this essay to those who are comfortable overlooking truth for the sake of allegiance to political party, nor does it, most likely, reveal the same meaning to those who aren't already critical of how contemporary political and public rhetorics are being performed. Nevertheless, the post-truth paradox, I'll argue, ironically retains, or preserves, the notion that truth will exist as long as it can be interpreted, both in it's meaning, as I've interpreted it, and in it's nature as linguistic and rhetorical device that has to be interpreted in order to be meaningful. The post-truth paradox is both an assertion of the existence of truth, and a practice in the kind of interpretive action that creates truth.