The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump by Michiko Kakutani
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“In a republican nation, whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance”
― Thomas Jefferson
“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
― Thomas Jefferson
I’m sure every reader of this has asked themselves, “How do these people believe the lies coming out of our political leaders that are demonstrably false?” There has been a subtle shift in the common epistemology that has been deliberately engineered for the benefit of a few. No longer do people claim, “I believe it because it is true and here is how I know that.” Today, the mantra is, “I believe it so therefore it is true.” It matters not whether the claim is the earth is flat and 6,000 years old, or that politicians you don’t like are surely running a child sex ring out of the basement of a building which has no basement, it is true because they believe it to be true. Congruence to reality has ceased to have any intellectual weight in these peoples’ thinking process. How did we get to this point? This book attempts to answer that question and, in this reader’s opinion, answers it well. Well written and well researched, it traces back the various threads that have come together to give us the intellectual climate we find a large percentage of our fellow Americans living in. The two pronged attack on reason and the free press is, as it turns out, by design and this book unpacks the “how” and “why” behind it.
secularinthesouth 