I did a post a while back discussing my thoughts and views on what "truth" is and today I'll slightly revisit that topic but I want to expand into my thoughts on "post-truth" and why that statement is being used more often. Personally, I feel that many people are waking up to the fact that we live in a world where truth is rarely what it seems and the ability and desire to remain flexible in our beliefs and learned behaviors is very beneficial to our own personal growth and mental health. That being said, I'll start by briefly going over my views on "truth."
Truth is not something that can really be told or taught to anyone. We live in a world where governments want to control our minds and influence our decisions to essentially use us like a resource. The media is controlled and paid for by the government. The leaders that we "elect" have no real power. Truth is a very subjective term and while many people have no problem telling you what the "truth" is, you're probably smart enough to notice that things don't really add up with what they say most of the time. In my mind, truth isn't something that can ever be told or taught, because it is something that we all have to realize for ourselves.
Facts and truth are not the same thing. When I say something like "the media is controlled and paid for by the government," this is a fact that I can support with documentation and laws put into place throughout history. That doesn't make what I said true, it just makes it a fact. The truth about facts is that they can be manipulated and controlled to paint pictures of what "truth" someone wants us to believe. In essence, if you control the facts or the narrative, you control the truth. The truth about the truth that I've discovered is that it's actually much more complicated than that and personally I don't feel that any of us will ever know the whole truth about much of anything.
Truth is subjective because it's perspective based. There is the "known truth," which is what we know and believe to be true, and there is the "unknown truth," which is what we don't know or assume to be false. The problem is that we need both the known and unknown aspects of the truth to ever know the "whole truth." If we have no idea what is unknown and are unwilling to explore that facet of things or if we are unwilling to accept that our own "truths" may not be the "whole truth," then we don't ever expand our own awareness of the world around us. I believe that the term "post-truth" or "post-truth era" is fairly accurate of the state of human consciousness right now, as more people wake up to realize that what we were told or taught in schools and by society is a very limited perspective of what the "truth" that some want us to believe actually is in the grand scheme of existence. Namaste.