RAYMUND FERNANDEZ
Used to be that only a few academics of a specialized knowledge in the fields of information and linguistics concerned themselves with signs and symbols, and how they worked in constructing meaning and the illusion of truth in people’s minds. Now, it’s everywhere, transforming communication — especially mass communication — into an insidious enterprise: manipulative, underhanded, crass, dehumanizing, and worst of all, artless.
There is no art in fooling people, no art in propaganda, and certainly, no art in fake news, no art in purveying the lie. But then, a lie is a living, breathing organism easily recognizable by the signs every organism manifests.
Organisms eat and shit. Which is why a lie is easily recognizable by its smell. It is a smell that accumulates over time. The purveyors of lies always reveal themselves eventually and inescapably. Because no lie survives by itself, alone. For the lie to survive over time, it must unceasingly construct itself.
And quite ironically, it must build itself on human assertions that would seem to be obvious truths. And since humans are by nature truth seekers, they are especially vulnerable; unless they understand how every human assertion is built like a brick tower.
The most visible bricks appear always as solid inarguable truths. They appear as tautologies, self-manifest and repetitious. But there is an architecture to human assertions that can be studied and understood.
Take for instance the “truth of God” of every religion. The most obvious bricks of religious practice can claim to be and do appear like inescapable truths. Claims of goodness, especially the goodness of human behavior based on religious tenets, are always difficult to argue against.
To determine the truth of religions, one must come down from the heights of the brick tower and look for its base — the first layer of bricks upon which the tower is built. Always, what one finds there is a blank space, an absence of concrete evidence to prove beyond a doubt the fact of the god’s existence. This doesn’t mean that God does not exist.
It means simply that when we believe in God, we believe by virtue of faith and not by virtue of fact. Faith is always undeniably a good thing if it is what holds the person and his community together. Faith is always worthy of respect.
Quite unfortunately, not all human assertions are as benevolent as the simple faith in God. Certain assertions claiming to be truthful contribute only to preserving oppressive social institutions and regimes that keep humans ignorant.
Lies, especially socially established lies, have bedeviled man for centuries. They afflict us even now. Its most obvious symptom is gullibility. Its most obvious effect is to condition humans to be easily gullible even to the most obvious untruths.
And always, the truth-seeking human must determine the factuality of any truth especially when passing judgement over the welfare of those less powerful. And most especially where this concerns the power over life and death.
In these instances, the powerful must determine whether they are acting on the basis of facts rather than of faith. For it should be said that while certain faiths are worthy enough to die for, no faith is ever worthy enough to kill for.
This is true not only where faith in God is concerned. It is many quantum times more true where faith in a political leader is concerned. This is plain and simple, requiring no further explanation. And its applicability to things as they now transpire is manifest and self-evident.
And since we have come to a time when we are bombarded all the time with information, so should we develop our olfactory senses for the smell of untruths and fake news. No law needs to be passed for this.
A person’s innate sincerity gives the person a sense for the lack of it. The truly sincere person can sense the sincerity of another, or the lack of it. The truth-seeking human may not see it right away.
But truth or the lack of it always reveals itself even in the environment of the social networks such as we have now. It is true that fake news travels faster now.
But so too travels faster our own capacity to discern them whenever and wherever they pop out in our accounts. We are better now. No one can fake news us as easily as before.
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