Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that 'the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which (men's) wishes safely can be carried out.'
Oliver Wendell Holmes in Matthew D'Ancona's book Post Truth: The new war on truth and how to fight back
"Our beliefs come first; we make up reasons for them as we go along. Being smarter or having access to more information doesn't necessarily make us less susceptible to faulty beliefs."
Rob Brotherton (this and all further sources as above)
"We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning... Despite efforts to reinject message and content, meaning is lost and devoured faster than it can be reinjected... Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media desocialized or virtually asocial... where we think that information produces meaning , the opposite occurs."
Jean Baudrillard (1981)
"The epistemology of Post-Truth urges us to accept that the are 'incommensurable realities' and that prudent conduct consists in choosing sides rather than evaluationg evidence."
Matthew D'Ancona
"Even under the best forms (of government), those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that... they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes."
Thomas Jefferson
"The idea of 'doublethink' - the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind and accepting both of them' - is the direct ancestor of Post-Truth."
D'Ancona (on Orwell)
"Learning how to navigate the web with discernment is the most pressing cultural mission of our age."
D'Ancona
"Today, most people find news and information on the web through just a handful of social media sites and search engines. These sites make more money when we click on the links they show us. And, the choose what to show us based on algorithms which learn from our personal data that they are constantly harvesting. The net result is that these sites show us content they think we'll click on - meaning the misinformation, or 'fake news', which is surprising, shocking, or designed to appeal to our biases can spread like wildfire... those with bad intentions can hame the system to spread ,isinformation for financial or political gain."
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
"In the right circumstances, a lie may be defeated by the skilful deployment of facts. But Post-Truth is, first and foremost, an emotional phenomenon. It concerns our attitude to truth, rather than truth itself."
D'Ancona
"As much as the modern electorate despises politicians, it sill turns to them reflexively for solutions to everything. Our instinctive response to a problem is to say: 'they should do something about that'. But who are 'they'? 'They' used to be 'us'."
D'Ancona