“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, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
Harari is right to caution that in an open arena of unchecked information, truth does not necessarily prevail. It is a seductive myth of modern democracies that freedom of speech and a vibrant media ecosystem will automatically yield truth. In reality, such freedom often fertilizes the soil for propaganda, pseudo-history, and mythologies to flourish. The marketplace of ideas, unregulated and profit-driven, is rarely a meritocracy of truth; it is more often a theatre of persuasion.
In liberal societies, just as in totalitarian ones, the populace is not immune to indoctrination. The lies may differ in tone and texture—some wrapped in ideology, others in entertainment or moral righteousness—but the effect remains: widespread belief in constructed narratives.
This is not a modern disease. Civilizations have always been built not upon truth, but upon compelling fictions. Mythologies, philosophies, and utopian dreams have served as the glue of social order. Truth is elusive, and certainty even more so. What we call civilization is, in many ways, the history of humanity’s most successful lies.
The human capacity to fabricate—and to believe in those fabrications—is not a bug in our social code; it is the architecture. Tribes, nations, religions, and even revolutions are all founded more on narrative than on fact. Perhaps, then, the question is not whether we are living in truth, but which fictions we choose to live by.
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