“As we have seen again and again throughout history, in a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose. To tilt the balance in favour of truth, networks must develop and maintain strong self-correcting mechanisms that reward truth telling. These self-correcting mechanisms are costly, but if you want to get the truth, you must invest in them.”
~ Yuval Noah Harari in Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
Harari is right when he says that “in a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose.” Today, most people accept as the universal truth that in a society where there is freedom of speech and a vibrant mainstream media industry, the politics and culture will be driven by “facts.” But that is never the case. In such societies the facts tend to lose, and the news cycle, or the politics and culture, are driven by propaganda and pseudo-history (lies, absurdities, fictions, philosophies and mythologies).
The masses in countries with freedom of speech and thriving mainstream media companies are as deeply brainwashed as those who live in totalitarian countries.
But this is not a new development—all civilizations of the past were founded on lies, absurdities, mythologies, fictions, unprovable philosophies and utopian visions. There has never been a society founded on the basis of truth. Truth is unknowable and certainty is impossible. The human capacity to lie and believe in lies has always been the fountainhead of all tribes, cults, nations and civilizations.
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