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 – have been cast aside, deemed silly and old-fashioned, in the scramble for wealth, power and ego. Respect for experience, expertise, ideas and for the need to study and ‘learn’ have been deleted and instead replaced by ‘alternate facts’, ‘relative opinion’ and routinely by simple and conscious lying.
For this we now also have a new term: ‘gaslighting’.
Deception and dishonesty have become normalised and are often praised for their degree of skill and ‘cleverness’, often through the use of administrative, accounting, linguistic or legal gymnastics. ‘Winning’ at all costs is now deemed to be success, regardless of any broader consequences for society or the planet or regardless of who gets hurt along the way.
Recent examples of this pattern include Malta’s 2022 election campaign, which almost completely unhitched itself from any reality; Boris Johnson’s newfound (and selective) commitment to international law; Jair Bolsonaro’s national ‘response’ to COVID-19 or Marine Le Pen’s warnings about a ‘migrant invasion and take-over of Europe’.
The dangers of official ‘fakery’ that have immediate and longer-term effects for us, for others and for the planet were also evident during Pope Francis’ visit to Malta. The recent election’s overarching projection of Malta’s future ‘without limits or constraints’ economic growth is but another example. Additionally, there is the much vaunted but never realised promise of the preservation and protection of the country’s environment.
Rushing forward to be photographed alongside the Pope and fawning over his presence while simultaneously and resolutely ignoring or denying the substance and the spirit of his homilies was epic fakery. Pope Francis specifically referred to the discarding of the despised in society (particularly migrants) at precisely the same moment as the Maltese state was, yet again ducking and dodging in order to refuse assistance to 106 migrants at sea.
The fakery of parroting the self-evidently false and hostile line that "Malta is full" was at full throttle in the comments recorded in this paper. This gaslighting comes from the top and is echoed without logic, fact or reasoning almost everywhere usually with large doses of ‘outrage’.
Meanwhile both of Malta’s dominant political parties continue to deny the country’s staggering ecological deficit (the level of resource consumption and waste by a population that is in excess of local sustainability) revealed in the latest global footprint data to be at a staggering 1000% with the 15th worst performance worldwide. Yet the mantra remains ‘more, more and more…there is no limit’.
The fakery of so many of our (mis)leaders is on full public display almost daily in their treatment of the environment, of migrants, in their selective referencing of human rights and in the gaslighting of their citizens. No amount of legal, linguistic, marketing, and administrative ‘post-truths’ is deemed too much.
Meaningful citizenship education has never been more urgently needed if we are to begin to address the very significant challenges before us. Gaslighting and gasbagging will not serve us well.