‘Misinformation’ Is The Vocabulary Of A Culture That Has Lost Its Capacity To Discuss ‘Truth’

[Kamaji]

‘Misinformation’ Is The Vocabulary Of A Culture That Has Lost Its Capacity To Discuss ‘Truth’

The perversion of truth is falsehood; misinformation is just the perversion of information.

BY: ELLE PURNELL
JULY 07, 2023

In a preliminary injunction issued against the White House and federal agencies on Tuesday in Missouri v. Biden, Judge Terry Doughty eviscerated government actors for colluding with social media companies to censor users’ protected speech in the name of eliminating “misinformation.”

Doughty, as others have done, compares the government censorship to Orwell’s hypothetical “Ministry of Truth.” But Orwell’s satirical title gives the speech police too much credit: It assumes “truth” is still a functional part of their vocabulary. No, our censors speak in terms of “misinformation.”

The perversion of truth is falsehood; misinformation is just the perversion of information. Truth has a moral component; information doesn’t. Years of moral relativism have eroded our cultural understanding of “truth” as a knowable, agreed-upon concept — and in our modern world, all we’re left with is an infinite supply of information.

Truth, Discerned in Nature by Reason
For most of Western history, philosophers and laymen alike have agreed upon the existence of “truth,” as a factual concept but also as a moral one.

*  *  *

Today, we see factual relativism as well as moral. Not only does our prevailing social ethic tolerate individuals’ self-determination of “what’s right for me,” we’ve gone so far as to nod along when a man says he is actually a woman, lacking the philosophical footing to explain why that simply can’t be true.

To “speak your truth,” as distinct from the truth, is a moral victory to be praised according to our prevalent irrational dogma. Our cultural rejection of reason is evident in every field: Look at the deconstructionist sculptures and poetry that pass for art, or the assault on the fixed, rational rules of mathematics.

*  *  *

Enter the pervasive concept of “misinformation.” It’s not a new term — Noah Webster defined it in 1828 as “false account or intelligence received.” The very idea of “misinformation” as it was understood in Webster’s time was basically a photonegative of truth: One could be misinformed, but the “false account” could be understood to be false precisely because it contradicted something true.

But in a post-rational world, “misinformation” means something else. One of the government bureaucrats accused in Missouri v. Biden of working to censor Americans admitted as much, in a very un-self-aware statement: “CISA Director Easterly stated: ‘We live in a world where people talk about alternative facts, post-truth, which I think is really, really dangerous if people get to pick their own facts,'” according to Doughty.

*  *  *

Source:  https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/07/misinformation-is-the-vocabulary-of-a-culture-that-has-lost-its-capacity-to-discuss-truth/