A Moment in Time: Truth vs Post-Truth

It’s been over a week now since Charlie Kirk was murdered.

Today was his public memorial service, attended by close to 100,000 people.

I’ve spent a lot of time this past week reflecting on where we are as a society, and where we are likely heading.

As best as I can tell, there are two factions in the world right now.

Some call them right and left, but I shall call them truth and post-truth.

One faction believes that men can be women, words are violent, borders don’t exist, and rich people are the devil.

The other faction believes that men are men, traditions are traditions for a reason, words have consequences but are not in and of themselves violent, borders exist to protect citizens and culture, and production creates prosperity.

One side wants the government to extract wealth from productive citizens and redistribute it to them for doing nothing, and the other simply wants the government to leave them the hell alone.

To be honest, I have a difficult time seeing how the two views are reconcilable.

If the one guy willing to have an open, civil debate with these people on matters they disagree with was shot and murdered, and his death celebrated and mocked by them, what is there to reconcile? Why would one even want to reconcile with these people?

JD Vance said it best when he stated ‘there can be no unity’ with such people.

If you cooperate with people who have never cooperated in the past, and show no intention of cooperating in the future, you will simply be exploited.

For this reason, I find the argument from the left - who are increasingly the post-truth crowd - particularly ridiculous.

‘Oh, you’d like to stop people being fired from their jobs for celebrating murder? Really, why? Do you want to work with these types of people?’

What type of sick person celebrates the death of an innocent man simply for speaking words you don’t agree with?

Would you trust that type of person with teaching your kids, performing life-saving surgery on you, or with something as comparatively trivial as not breaching a contract?

What’s more, what type of corrupt individual defends them for facing the natural consequences of their actions?

What does the world look like when no one can trust each other? Where the truth is twisted and distorted for malevolent means and no one can tell right from wrong?

Nothing good, that’s for sure.

This idea of group-think for the sake of group-think is a dangerous ideology.

I say that not just to the left, but to the right too.

You should, at all times, be thinking independently, and coming to your own conclusions about what is right or wrong.

If you need some random influencer on the internet to tell you what is right or wrong, or if you need to ask Grok

‘Hey Grok, is it wrong to dance on the grave of an innocent man just murdered in front of his wife and children?’, you have some serious soul searching to do.

Throw away your phone and don’t come back until you’ve reset your brain.

In many ways, I look at the events of the past week as an unfortunate extension of the times we now live in: one where political violence is increasingly normalised, people live in silos of ‘post-truth’ propagated by viral social media algorithms, and, perhaps most importantly, people are becoming increasingly poor.

Not just poor financially, but spiritually too.

Think about the trends of the world we now live in.

• Language has been politicised and hate speech (whatever ‘hate’ actually means in the eyes of the law) criminalised.
• People have no genuine ownership in the ‘system’ we call society:
• Buying a house is now ‘impossibly unaffordable’
• People are lonelier than ever before both in terms of relationships with significant others and friends
• It’s never been harder to get a good, well-paying, stable job
• Religion has been on the decline

People lack meaning.

And in the absence of such meaning, they will create their own.

What meaning will they create?

Well, if they can’t get any of the things society has promised them their entire lives they are owed by participating, they will choose to burn it down in its entirety.

In other words, they will choose destruction.

They will not care about seeking truth, if the post-truth world others have constructed for them helps propagate their message of destruction, for the manipulation of language is a means to an end for them.

The end they are seeking is one where they are free from the grips of a society that has lied to them, about everything, from birth.

They were told they should go to school, get good grades, work hard to get a job, and that job would lead to stability and prosperity, and eventually, a family that respects them.

Instead they entered a world that was anything but stable and prosperous, and they were left to fend on their own.

This is perhaps the only common thread between those on the left and right, and maybe also the only thread that offers any hope for reconciliation between the two groups down the line:

The social contract is broken beyond repair, it’s just that each side has a very different perspective on why that is and what the solutions are.

And importantly, each side is exposed to different truths.

The left are fed ‘post-truths’ by the mainstream media that everyone who supports freedom in all its forms is now a Nazi, and the right is increasingly fed actual truths because their news is less corrupted - i.e. straight from the source, on X.

I found it particularly ironic that the left cared more about Jimmy Kimmel being fired than a hugely popular activist being murdered for speaking words others didn’t like, but then again should I have really been surprised?

These are the same people that not too long ago believed President Trump set up his own assassination attempt to win more votes.

And they’re the same people who made the ‘shame the shooter missed!’ comments about it, openly and honestly in corporate workplaces.

These same people gloated when they completely de-platformed a sitting President of the United States off all social media just a few years back, banned people for ‘misinformation’ about the covid vaccines that ended up being true, and in many States implemented the most draconian lockdown laws in the world whilst overriding your bodily autonomy.

When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.

These people have no morals.

Just look at their track record: happy to censor you when it suits their narrative, happy to celebrate murder and attempted murders, happy to defend the words of liars, happy to violate your right to bodily autonomy.

Is there anything left they have NOT violated?

Then they have the absolute audacity to claim that apparently the right started all this?

They are simply delusional.

Their worldview is now shaped entirely from the many post-truths the mainstream media and fake, power hungry individuals propagate to them for engagement.

The cognitive dissonance is astounding.

When I think about the direction things are heading, I can’t help but wonder, will the truth, or post-truth win out?

How will we even tell the difference in a world where all digital media can be created by AI, and becomes indistinguishable from human generated content?

If you can spend money to produce highly engaging, realistic, AI generated media with a single button click, eventually most of the internet gets flooded with that content.

When friction trends to zero, supply trends to infinity.

What is easy to produce gets produced in surplus.

Which means the ‘post-truth’ world is going to accelerate at a rapid pace, and it won’t be long before people’s view of reality bears no resemblance to the world we actually live in…

Perhaps we’ve already passed this threshold.

If truth no longer exists, all that matters is who has the strongest narrative to attract attention, because attention is influence.

Whichever group can create the most resonant message and distribute it to the most people digitally, will win the entire Game.

How this all ends, nobody knows, but one thing is for sure: it’s likely about to get much more extreme, on both sides.

And pretty soon no one will know what is true and what isn’t.