It feels counterintuitive to even need to write about the importance of speaking the truth. After all, from a very young age we are indoctrinated as individuals and as part of social groups that being truthful is an essential personal characteristic and a pillar of society, without which it would collapse. Our social constructs and activities, from education to religion, politics, the justice system, businesses and even sport, let alone family and interpersonal relations, cannot prevail without being founded on trust based on truth in our interactions. However, we live in a world in which truth is increasingly in the eye of the beholder and being honest is becoming secondary to the utility of being untruthful. In most fields of life, the need for truthfulness is almost taken for granted, as it should be, and those who diverge from this norm face legal, moral or social sanctions. However, worryingly, in one crucial realm of human activity, bending the truth, inaccuracies, distortion and evasion, not to mention outright deceit, are at least tolerated, if not yet fully integrated; and that realm is politics. What we won’t tolerate from our doctor, a teacher, a banker, the local police, civil servants or judges, we are almost blase about when it happens in the political discourse. The very politicians that we vote for, we also don’t trust at all, as was expressed in a recent global survey. Politicians are the least-trusted professionals, with two-thirds of respondents saying they don’t trust them, while scientists, doctors and teachers are regarded by citizens as the most trustworthy. It was suggested a number of years ago that we had entered the era of “post-truth” and, in 2016, Oxford Dictionaries selected that term as its international word of the year. It defined the term as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” It was the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who argued that “there are no facts, only interpretations.” This view corresponds with the late 20th-century postmodernist philosophy that is generally characterized by a subjectivism and a relativism denoting that there is no objective reality and there is no one scientific or historical truth, only narratives. Certainly, interpretations of reality play an essential part in the way we see and perceive the world, and they are an important ingredient in the progress of knowledge through pitching them one against the other in debate. Nevertheless, at the same time there are, on the one hand, facts that are indisputable and, on the other, there are blunt lies. Without the ability to discern one from the other, we harm any constructive discourse in our societies. That so many of our politicians have mishandled the current coronavirus disease pandemic is deadly living proof of this. In the attack on the US Capitol, we saw how a toxic atmosphere created by untruths can translate into a violent insurrection. Yossi Mekelberg One major contributory factor to the dissemination of misinformation and sheer fallacies on a global scale is the emergence of a new species of public opinion shapers. Social media has blurred the lines between fact and fiction and between well-substantiated information and fake news. For the average user, it is not always possible to tell one from the other, especially when such media draws on preconceived beliefs. These untruths spread in nanoseconds to huge numbers of users, many of them like-minded, and confirm those users’ views, regardless of how vile and detached from reality they might be — thus creating virtual micro-social movements with their own raisons d’etre. This in turn creates distorted, confrontational and divisive debates that lead to the ascendance of the wrong leaders with the wrong policies. Don’t get me wrong, falsehoods are not used only by tiny groups of extremists, but for years have been exploited by mainstream politicians wishing to advance their vested interests and besmirch the reputations of their rivals by exploiting emotional responses and human vulnerabilities while disdaining rational debate. The unbearable ease with which misinformation spreads through cyberspace is an almost irresistible temptation for political movements, both mainstream and, in particular, those negligible and marginal groups that are able to use the internet to attract attention and support in numbers disproportionate to their size and importance. This carries with it the immense danger of a heightened erosion of trust, both in our public institutions and our traditional media sources. Throughout the 2016 Brexit referendum and its aftermath, for instance, the impact on British society of voters being exposed not only to opposing opinions, but to speculation and sheer lies presented as facts, raised the question, especially due to the Brexiters’ miniscule margin of victory, of what would have been the result had the entire debate been based on facts and not fabrications. Most people believe that their opinions and decisions are entirely theirs. Ultimately this is the case but, in the process of making these “independent” decisions, each of us is influenced by a variety of information sources. Elections are arguably the institutions most susceptible to the spread of disinformation, from within the country and/or by external actors. If successful, an election campaign distorted in this way could have relatively instant results and have an impact for years. We are all basking in the joy of our access to unprecedented amounts of information brought about by technological advancements, but this has been accompanied by the very disturbing phenomenon of the blurring of lines between what is true and what is not; what is real and what is fake; and what is scientific knowledge and what is, at best, a hypothesis or speculation. Without clearly demarcating the lines between true and false, the very foundations of our society are in danger of collapse. Yossi Mekelberg is professor of international relations at Regent’s University London, where he is head of the International Relations and Social Sciences Program. He is also an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House. He is a regular contributor to the international written and electronic media. Twitter: @YMekelberg Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News" point-of-view