Truth takes a sadly long holiday

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/01/2025 (315 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

My coffee tastes extra bitter this morning.

Like Donald Trump’s November victory in the United States, it’s leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

It’s not so much the acrid aftermath of the Democrats’ election loss I’m feeling, but a far greater bereavement — larger in scope and significance even than the results of our southern neighbours’ presidential election.

This is not about vote shares or individual candidate upsets, swing states or senate seats.

It’s about the death of the truth.

Of course, the truth’s value as currency has been steadily dwindling since long before Trump first took office. But he’s played a strong role in its devaluation.

And nowhere has this been as spectacularly evident as during this most recent American election cycle.

Trump’s failings — both moral and legal — are quite well known, so there’s no point in regurgitating them here.

What he’s very good at is stating lies as facts and repeating them so often that they take hold in people’s brains.

He’s a baron of bombast, speaking in superlatives that are easy to remember. He will implement what he has called “the largest deportation program in American history.” He threatens to jack up tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods, saying the United States subsidizes each of these countries by billions of dollars each year.

“If we’re going to subsidize them, let them become a state (of the U.S.),” Trump told NBC in a post-election interview. He has boasted that he will end the war between Russia and Ukraine in one day.

These are exaggerations some of us may find easy to dismiss but which nonetheless may well find fertile ground among U.S. citizens yearning for a reassertion of their country’s dominance and might on the world stage. But as I said, the problem here is so much bigger than Trump. The problem is that veracity has lost its value. Think about the world we live in. Social media is rife with deepfaked videos, artificial intelligence-generated images and photoshopped pictures, all of which freely proliferate with little or no oversight.

AI is being used in applications both benign and malevolent, from fun customized emojis, to ads for ketchup and Coca-Cola, to sexualized images of prepubescent children, to persuasive political propaganda to manipulate public sentiment.

In Canada, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was momentarily mocked for releasing an idealized “Canadian dream” video which contained stock images of what were later identified as Russian fighter jets rather than the shiny new Canadian defence assets the video suggested were being used to protect our home and native land.

No big deal though, right?

Last month in Alberta, the police were warning consumers to stay clear of scam ads featuring AI-generated images of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and billionaire Elon Musk after Edmontonians were bilked out of nearly $2 million.

When members of the Royal Family see fit to doctor innocuous family photos, it’s a sad fact that the truth has become devalued and we can’t always trust what we’re seeing or hearing. (Which is why trusted news sources are so important.) Remember when what was true had inherent value? If a person was honest, they were as good as their word. Honesty really was once thought to be the best policy, and truth was revered in all manner of well-known aphorisms.

“The truth will set you free.”

“The truth will out.”

It used to be that a politician or public figurehead caught in a lie faced the ruination of their career — and that still happens on occasion — but more and more, half-truths, lies and out-and-out fabrications seem to be run-of-the-mill tools in the arsenal. All’s fair in politics and war.

Of course I realize that propaganda has been around since ancient times, used to manipulate the enemy to gain an edge in battle. But in our current times, fakery and lies have sadly become all-too-common currency. No longer just used as means to an end in war, they are now routinely employed to sabotage and swindle one’s fellow citizens as well as political enemies.

The author Aldous Huxley once observed that “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored,” and that’s true. But in our increasingly inauthentic world, where images are cunningly curated and engineered to provoke complacency, fear, shock or rage, it’s getting harder and harder to ferret out the facts from beneath all the lies.

Truth, like the Canadian dollar, has become weaker in value, and integrity is trading for pennies.

Pam Frampton is a freelance writer and editor who lives in St. John’s.

Email pamelajframpton@gmail.com X: pam_frampton | Bluesky: @pamframpton.bsky.social