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Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society
Wiley
March 2008
On Sale: March 17, 2008
256 pages
ISBN: 0470050101
EAN: 9780470050101
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Picture yourself at a college football championship game.
Cheering fans of both teams clog the stands. The play is
rough, and the crowd is fed up. Supporters of each side
insist that their own guys are playing fair but the other
team is clearly breaking the rules. How can both sides be
right? According to the surprising insights of True Enough,
they are: when sports fans claim to see only the opposing
team playing dirty, that really is what they "see." It is a
classic example of how our deeply held beliefs can supplant
our very perceptions of what's "real" and what's not in the
world around us. And as Farhad Manjoo explains, the
phenomenon holds sway in areas far removed from football. In True Enough, Manjoo presents findings from psychology,
sociology, political science, and economics to show how new
technologies are prompting the cultural ascendancy of belief
over fact. In an age of talk radio, cable TV, and the
Internet—the blog- and YouTube-addled million-channel media
universe—it is no longer necessary for any of us to confront
notions that contradict what we "know" to be true. Stephen
Colbert calls this "truthiness"—when something feels true
without any evidence that it is. Here Manjoo probes the
cognitive basis of truthiness, exploring how biases push
both liberals and conservatives to select and interpret news
in a way that accords with their personal versions of "reality." Why has punditry lately overtaken news, with so many media
outlets pushing partisan agendas instead of information? Why
do lies seem to linger so long in the cultural subconscious
even after they've been thoroughly discredited? And why,
when more people than ever before are documenting the truth
with laptops and digital cameras, does fact-free spin and
propagandaseem to work so well? True Enough explores leading
controversies of national politics, foreign affairs,
science, and business, explaining how Americans have begun
to organize themselves into echo chambers that harbor
diametrically different facts—not merely opinions—from those
of the larger culture. We meet people who espouse far-out
interpretations of reality—about everything from the history
of John Kerry's time in Vietnam to the integrity of the 2004
election to the truth about 9/11—and dig into the mechanism
by which they came to hold those beliefs. Controversial, at times disturbing, and always fascinating,
True Enough will prompt you to think twice about how you too
came to believe all that you do. Are your own truths really
true—or merely true enough?
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