Blurred Borders between Fact and Fantasy: A Critique of Hannah Arendt’s “Defactualization” in a Subtly Self-aggrandizing and Overtly Deceiving “Post-Truth Era”

The term “post –truth”, that is believed to have made its maiden appearance in a 1992 essay, pertaining to the Iran-Contra Scandal and Persian Gulf War, garnered widespread popularity, in the form of "post-truth politics" recently on account of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the U.K. Brexit referendum. In fact, it was a political culture in which public opinions and media narratives have become almost entirely disconnected from the substance and policy of legislation. Interestingly such a relatively recent concept that has been vaulted up in an age of Twitter threads and viral news has its roots in post-modernity, relativism, even in the philosophical notions of Nietzsche, Weber, Leo Strauss, Foucault and Derrida, who were inevitably sceptical of the division between facts and values.

This paper is an unbiased and dispassionate exploration through a few books, involving controversies, scandals and assassinations deeply engrossed in our political and social landscape, with renewed passion and indignation. In the Trumpian climate, generally characterised by fabricated truths, misinformation, falsehood and misleading propaganda, "defactualisation" is one of the greatest crisis where facts are either habitually denied or ignored due to an emphasis on subjectivity. At this point, literary study becomes more important than ever as literature invents in order to tell us hard-won and difficult truths.
The sixteenth-century British philosopher Francis Bacon quipped, 'What is truth?' 1 said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. "Contrary to this reflection, let us stay for a while, though hesitatingly for an answer.
Truth, being a disputed territory and an ambiguous farrago today, quite many of us are likely to give up on the hunt for truth altogether, articulating a universal truce on truth claims.
The English traditionalist philosopher, Roger Scruton argues, "All discourse and dialogue depend upon the concept of truth. "To agree with another is to accept the truth of what he says; to disagree is to reject it." 2 However, is truth nothing more than a conversational convention or do we really mean something relative or absolute when we say that something is true or false? It is never too hard to catechize these takes on truth since it is uncertain as for whom truth works in the first place, whether for an individual or society? If truth is merely a social construct, how do we condone a society that physically mutilates women or sexually abuse children? Science, which identifies physical relationships and principles that explain the world around us, at times go silent when we need to look beyond facts, data and observations.
Finally, one can combat tyranny, only if one can recognise it. If nothing is true, how do you criticise power for then it is devoid of basis; submission to tyranny is the consequential of renouncing the difference between what we wish to hear and what it actually is. This culminates in the demise of one's individuality and the collapse of any political system that depends upon this individualism.
The term "post -truth", that is believed to have made its maiden appearance in a 1992 essay, pertaining to the Iran-Contra Scandal and Persian Gulf War, garnered widespread Differentiating "defactualization" from "deliberate falsehood" and from "lying" Arendt writes, "The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts; that is, with matters that carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are. Factual truths are never compellingly true. 6 Arendt continues emphatically, Truth or falsehood-it does not matter which anymore, if your life depends on your acting as though you trusted; truth that can be relied on disappears entirely from public life, and with it the chief stabilizing factor in the ever-changing affairs of men. 7 When the Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich first used the word "post-truth" in his article "A Government of Lies" (1992) in The Nation, referring it to "circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief" 8 , it is never an exaggeration if the Oxford Dictionaries designated "posttruth" its 2016 Word of the Year.
Tesich argues that "American society that has made the conscious decision to live in a post-truth world at the expense of democracy is a testimony of how humans' desire to protect their self-esteem has allowed government figureheads to shield the public from the truth 9 .
Evidently the author's dissection of the government's action and public's lack of action in this article asserts his argument that the George H. W. Bush Administration's "felt safe" in deceiving the public about the Persian Gulf War since "it knows that the truth would have little impact on us" because "we, as free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world". 10 An intention to portray the existing government as having suddenly turned evil is definitely an improbability. In fact, Tesich claimed it is "we who have changed…we have transformed what we have perceived" 11 . The 27-year-old essay tells us that the more we, as society, stray from the truth, the closer we move towards a totalitarian Two important global events of 2016, the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election inflamed an aura of insecurities and pitfalls for the media, press and all over the world. "The free circulation of malicious lies, the ineffectiveness of fact-checking, the resilience of populist propaganda, racism and sexism, the indisputable features of the socalled post-truth era challenges the fundamental cornerstone of ethical journalismthat facts matter for democracy and that people want to be well-informed when called upon to make potentially life-changing decisions." 13 One can conveniently blame the current reigning triotechnology, internet and social media -whose integral priorities besides the media's own failures culminated in a fallacious and politicked press and broadcast system that again is beguiled in a catch-all Metropolitan elite, with its inadequate and inappropriate strategies to address a frustrated and wronged humanity.
Ken Wilber, the cutting -edge American philosopher, often hailed as the "Einstein of consciousness studies", the originator of the world's first truly integrative philosophy, "Integral Theory", explains how we arrived where we are and why there is cause for hope though in a world of turmoil, in his provocative work Trump and the Post-truth World.
Wilber blames the failure of a progressive, leading edge of society that is characterised by the desire to be as just and inclusive, to what we owe the thrust toward women's rights and liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the civil rights movement in the United States to end the racial discrimination and segregation, the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the concern for oppression in all its forms. "It is only when members of Global warming was termed "a multi-billion-dollar worldwide industry, created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists" by Martin Durkin, the British television director and producer. His film "The Great Global Warming Swindle" would radically change history, and predictions say that a span of five years would bear out the idea that 'greenhouse effect', the malefactor behind global warming is a convenient claptrap.
When responding to "the greatest scam in history", John Coleman, the American television weatherman claims, "The polar ice is increasing, not melting away. Polar Bears are increasing in number." 16 When Trump claimed that the global warming myth was concocted by the Chinese to decelerate the US manufacturing, the British journalist, Matt Ridley describes the "climate change agenda" as a "conspiracy against the poor" in The Spectatorin

Equivocally, National Geographic and some Australian meteorologists weighed in that
Durkin's film was "not scientifically sound and presents a flawed and very misleading interpretation of the science".
It was indeed quite agitating for the global sentiments as 'BeBest' website published an article reporting that President Trump had instructed his acting secretary of state to nullify any oaths of office that were taken on the Quran. This is rather challenging to nullify something which never had taken place at all. Specifically, a 28 January 2018 post on the blog "The Pedogate"stated that the Pope Francis Bergoglio was among three defendants found guilty "yesterday" of child trafficking and murder, among other grisly crimes, by the "International Common Law Court of Justice". The court itself serves as a one-man blog with the assertion that the Pope 'resigned', thus imputing it as fabricated information.Nobody other than the notorious junk news purveyor "Your News Wire" reports that California Governor Jerry Brown has mandated the use of gay pornography in elementary schools in order to teach children about LGBT sex, which has turned out to be one of the most trending hoax news of the times.
Fake news, the offspring of an unholy marriage between propaganda and advertising money have come to encompass many ends: propaganda tool, self-defence mechanism, or money-making scheme. Out of all the channels through which fake news spreads, false information is being passed around social media platforms, the biggest culprit being the instant messaging app, WhatsApp.In recent years, the peddling fake news via WhatsApp came to be an inevitable factor in inciting violence in India at least a few times. A lynching video, apparently old and taken from another country, was spread through WhatsApp as an An image of Gandhi, apparently captured the moment he was killed by NathuramGodse that had been going viral was found to be false and misleading by India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) as investigating the origin of the image, AFWA found it to be a still from 'Nine Hours to Rama', a 1963 movie by Mark Robinson.
Counter to contemporary definitions of post-truth that emphasize credence on emotion over facts and evidence, the notion of defactualization propounded by Arendt, identify"hyper-rationality as the mechanism that blurs the line between "fact and fantasy". 17 In a defactualized world, she explains that both deception and even self-deception are effected meaningless, for both rely on preserving the distinction between truth and falsehood. Nevertheless, in a defactualized environment, the individual severs all his contact with not only his audience, but also the real world, which definitely would keep up with him since he can always get rid of his mind from it but never his body.
Deception has become a routine part of contemporary life, and with the influence of therapists, entertainers, politicians, academics, and lawyers, with their flexible code of ethics, contribute to the post-truth era. "Post-truthfulness builds a fragile social edifice based on wariness. It erodes the foundation of trust that underlies any healthy civilization. When enough of us peddle fantasy as fact, society loses its grounding in reality. Society would crumble altogether if we assumed others were as likely to dissemble as tell the truth. We are perilously close to that point. This paper is an unbiased and dispassionate exploration througha few books, involving controversies, scandals and assassinations deeply engrossed in our political and social landscape, with renewed passion and indignation. In the Trumpian climate, generally characterised by fabricated truths, misinformation, falsehood and misleading propaganda, "defactualization" is one of the greatest crisis where facts are either habitually denied or ignored due to an emphasis on subjectivity. At this point, as the fake news machine whirrs and alternative facts abound, literary study becomes more important than ever as literature invents in order to tell us hard-won and difficult truths. Deception conceals, while literature reveals.