We've lived through and are living through a revolution. In the last ten years, maybe as few as the last two or three, we can finally all agree things can never again be what they were.
Maybe it's the exponential development of technology, maybe the internet, maybe just the extraordinary complexity and pace of everyday life now compared to yesterday and the day before.
Science puts it down to Uncertainty, thinkers to post-modernism and the decay of religion and the impossibility of facts. And politics puts it down to the coming of China, or to Putin or Trump, reappearances of types widely considered extinct.
Is it possibly in politics and, above all, in the deafening bombardment of political news, that the confusion fuses together? Is Donald Trump the herald, if not some embodiment of these times, when it's impossible any longer to know what's true? There is a case for it.
First, Donald Trump destroyed a foundational pillar of western life by the simplest of tricks. Just say
elections were fixed and: 1) all your supporters will of course agree;
and 2) quite a lot of other people will begin to wonder if there's some truth in it. Depressing though that is to discover, it has been shown to be a fact of life.
What followed was politicians everywhere quickly caught on. They had, after all, strong reassurance. If you lose, just reject the election results. Simple. It's become standard practice. It works, at least for a while.
But as so often in life and with people, there is a contradiction in it, a twist. The twist is this. If you destroy 'truth' by telling a lie, your lie is just another story not to be trusted. It can't be 'true' either.
Trump is losing today out of his own mouth. He's taught everyone what the truth is, and sooner or later they won't believe him.
Everyone works it out their own way, of course. But the truth is something inside us that doesn't go away whatever anyone says.
