Despite Donald Trump repeating numerous dubious statements throughout his presidential campaign, 70% of which were apparently rated untrue, he still managed to be voted into office. It’s not exactly a euphemism for old-fashioned lies, as some might think, or another way of saying “ truthiness.” It’s actually that facts are now somehow sidestepped as irrelevant, and there are fewer social or political consequences for public figures who blatantly mislead the public.
Welcome to the so-called post-truth era, a scary kind of world where facts, truth, and the meaning of words may not really matter much anymore. Who can you really trust when every day there are so many wild stories -believable fake news, unbelievable true stories-of police brutality and abuse, media machinations, and propaganda as the rusty old gears of government creak onward? In the face of such uncertainty, if you can’t be sure what facts are real, it’s hardly any wonder that many have rejected objective facts and choose to believe what feels right, and real, to them. For many, trust in certain public institutions-the media, the police, the government-is broken. Worst year or not, this is certainly an unstable time in history-and it seems even the way we use language to convey our collective fears and anxieties about the state of society seems fractured. Each of these accumulated shocks have become a kind of touchpoint for some of the cultural, social, and political trends that have emerged. This all seems to mark the passing of an older era as we venture, hurriedly and carelessly, into an newer unknown.
This is not to mention the unsettlingly high number of famous deaths this year. Many of the artists and cultural shapers who spoke truth to power, whose works often helped set the milestones of how modern society progresses, are gone: Harper Lee, Muhammad Ali, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, and Prince to name a few. It’ll certainly be remembered in the history books for some major global shocks to our collective systems. By mid-year, it was already being referred to as “disastrous” and “the worst year in history” as we witnessed monumental events of social upheaval, from horrifying acts of terrorism around the world (seemingly in a domino effect), disturbing record-breaking climate change disasters, societal instability and even collapse in the formerly prosperous Venezuela. The annus horribilis of 2016 is finally drawing to a close, having closed several times before its close, “so huge, so hopeless to conceive,” as Emily Dickinson might have it.
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