Turning the Post-Truth Fad Into a Pre-Truth Transition

Maybe we’re finally orbiting out of a cultural fad I’ll call “What the bleep do we know?” after the popular documentary of the same name, which argued, based on quantum uncertainty and Eastern philosophy, that the whole concept of reality is dubious. It made the case that, in reality, there is no reality—hypocritical though that is.

Under the influence of this fad, it became taboo to mention reality. You’d be discounted as pretentious. You can talk about your reality but not the reality.

The result? What we worry has become a post-truth society.

Still, it’s a fad that dies out on its own excesses and returns, sort of like 17-year locusts. Thus, a post-truth society is likely to be a pre-truth society in which it’s safe to talk about reality again.

Now, I don’t know much about reality, but I do know what it is. I think we all do. Let me explain. See if you agree.

Reality is the set of all realized and potential, direct and indirect, threats and opportunities to our surviving and thriving. It’s a brute fact, that which is indifferent to our opinions. You ignore the threat, and the threat still harms you. You ignore an opportunity, and you don’t thrive.

Though we’ll debate what’s in the set we call reality, there’s little debate about the set itself. Anyone who makes claims about reality is making claims about phenomena that could have a bearing on what we should do.

Reality is thus a pragmatic idealization. It's idealized the way God is idealized—the perfect something—in this case, the perfect set of every threat to watch out for and every opportunity to look forward to. It’s idealized because we’re not going to ever complete the set perfectly with no potential threats or opportunities overlooked and all threats and opportunities included.

So of course we’ll debate what it contains, but even if we disagree about what reality contains, we don’t disagree about the container.

This idealized set is pragmatic because reality matters to us. It matters the way being well-adapted to their environment is important to critters. Read reality wrong, and you die. It’s that pragmatic.

Reality changes over time, or rather what’s likely to occur changes over time. Though there’s nothing new under the sun (i.e., the set we call reality), how things are configured changes a lot.

Take us, for example. Apparently, humans were possible within the universe from its very origins. After all, here we are. We were just extremely unlikely back then. Now we’re very likely.

Apparently, likenesses change. Some possibilities get more likely; some get less likely. Possibilities emerge and evolve, de-merge and devolve.

There are better and worse methods for discovering what belongs in the set of all reality. Science has proven an uncommonly reliable way to sample and discover what's real. Science's methods will get better too. It’s new.

There are those who doubt science's exceptional merits as a way of discovering what's real. One of their talking points is that science makes mistakes. Well, duh! Of course, it does. It's populated by humans. Humans are gullible and susceptible to groupthink.

And, again, these are early days for science. It’s getting better. No one is saying science is perfect. The question is compared to what.

Many also imply that it's unfair, judgmental, and intolerant to suggest that any method of determining what's real is better than any other.

Though we may disagree about which methods are better, no one acts like they're indifferent to the method. And tolerance does make for greater social harmony. Still, getting along with people is one thing; getting along with reality is another. People can get along quite well with each other as they drive themselves united right off the cliffs of reality. The good fellowship among catastrophic fanatics can feel like sweet solidarity itself. One for all and all for a run right off the cliff.

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Many people also defend their community's supernatural beliefs against the threat of scientific dominance. They are often proud to insist that the God of their sacred text is more real than anything science counts as real.

Few act like they believe it. They trust science for practical matters. More often, they just like to cite a supernatural wild card with which to trump science when they don't want to believe the science anyway. Supernatural beliefs are a simple way to cherry-pick science.

Science is a radically different way of discovering what's real. It cultivates indifference. It’s heavily biased against personal bias. It doesn't aim to cherry-pick the encouraging, reassuring bits of reality but all of it, no matter how hard it is to swallow.

Science banks on the assumption that no matter how disappointing reality might end up being, we'll make the best of our experience of it by understanding it. Where religion comforts, science often confronts. Religion protects us from inconvenient truths that science exposes.

No wonder we’re ambivalent about science. It’s like seeing a doctor about a distressing symptom. You can’t count on the doctor to sugarcoat it.

Still, science is like religion in this one sense. Scientists have their God. Their God is reality itself, and they hold no other God higher. Their reality is their prayer, humbly kneeling at the feet of this idealized pragmatic set we call reality. They’re trying to understand reality’s ways.

Though it can be motivating to treat reality like it’s a God with aims, reality wants nothing of us. We want something from it, though. We want to thrive. We have faith that by trying to understand what’s in the set we call reality, we’ll thrive better.

So far, that faith is paying off so well that it gives us the sense that we’re getting ahead of ourselves. People often blame science for that, a dark force unleashed upon the world.

There’s something to it. Scientific findings become technology available to the public or the highest bidder. Many of the highest bidders regard their beliefs as more real than reality.

Einstein said, “The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking.”

I come back to this: Life has always been "fit reality or die." Defend against the real threats, and exploit the real opportunities. Evolve and learn better ways to do both. Become more adapted to reality. Get to know it better.

We threw a huge wrench in the works when we evolved language, by which people can name-drop their supernatural allies. Science in the hands of the delusional is indeed a dark force.

One of the things reality contains is our capacity for delusion. We have to be realistic about how unrealistic humans are.

That’s no reason to be post-truth and post-science. It’s a reason to curb our intellectual dishonesty, get over the “What the bleep do we know?” fad, and turn our post-reality state into a pre-reality transition.