Truthiness

True Enough


    As I continued reading Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough I could not help but think that it was proof that our society was inching closer and closer to a world in which fact does not matter.  While their is still a vast gap between the world we live in and a world where truth is no longer real, there are some passages in True Enough that point to some alarming ideas.  One passage in particular that stuck out to me was the one about “thruthiness”.  Manjoo describes how in our society something that feels true becomes true, even if it lacks in facts.  Through the passages about “Truthiness”, Farhad Manjoo’s book on a post-fact society point to a society growing more and more oblivious to truth.
      “Truthiness” as defined by the creator of the word, Stephen Colbert, is “the quality of a thing feeling true without any evidence suggesting it actually was” (189).  Colbert goes on to discuss “truthiness” in relation to the war in Iraq.  He says, “If you think about it, maybe there are a few missing pieces to the rational for war, but doesn’t taking Saddam out feel like the right thing, right here in the gut” (189).  And for most Americans at the time it did feel like the right thing to do.  The government told us they were going into Iraq to stop terrorism, find Osama, and rid Saddam of weapons of mass destruction.  Now, years later, with all the facts in order, it is clear that our intentions in Iraq did not include any of those three motives.  We never found Saddam having any ties to Al-Qaeda, Osama was not in Iraq, and we never found evidence of nuclear weapons.  So at the time invading Iraq may have felt right, but now that we think about it in retrospect, it clearly was not the truth, but we believed it anyway.
        Another passage that discusses “truthiness” is the one describing Robin Raskin.  Robin Raskin was a journalist who would go on the news and warn of the dangers of certain products, while simultaneously marketing other notable products that supposedly worked better.  Raskin was being paid by the companies of the products that she was marketing.  This is a very successful form of marketing because people do not realize she is being paid as a spokes person.  Because she was a so called “journalist” people assume she knows what she is talking about and take what she says as fact.  This is “truthiness” because it feels like she is telling the truth about this product, but when we think about the facts, the product she was advertising was probably no better than the one she was bashing.  Our culture is starting to believe things solely because someone with authority is telling them, instead of because it is true.
    Unfortunately,  True Enough is a scary wake up call.  We truly are living in a post fact society.  “Truthiness” has taken over our perception of reality and we no longer believe things based on facts or reason.  We believe things because it feels right, or because we trust the person telling us.  During the bush administration it was even considered a bad thing to be part of the “reality based community” (192).  One of Bush’s Officials was even quoted saying “ [The United States is] an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality...and while your studying that reality--judiciously as you will--we’ll act again, creating other new realities” (192).  This statement is startlingly close to the concepts in George Orwell’s 1984.  If we are not careful, our post-fact reality may be headed down a similar road as the world in 1984.