CONTEMPORARY
          EMOTIONALISM:
the ideal of veracity
is became so
                       WEAKENED

How is the ideal of veracity became so weakened, so etiolated, that it competes so poorly with CONTEMPORARY EMOTIONALISM ?

Today the growing suspicious that traditional sources of authority and information are unreliable, self-interested or even downright fraudulent is strongly present. This collapse of trust is the social basis of the Post-truth era.

Trust is an essential human survival mechanism, the basis of co-existence that permits any human relationship, from marriage to a complex society, to work with any degree of success. A community without trust ultimately becomes non more than an atomized collection of individuals, trembling in their stockades. In recent decades, a series of storms have conspired to deplete what reserves of trust remain.

The financial crisis of 2008 took the global economy to the brink of meltdown, banks were responsible for the disastrous collapse and ordinary people paid the price in the subsequent recession and cuts to public services imposed by governments conscious of deficit.

Hostility to the globalized economy shifted from the fringes to the centre of political discourse. It became commonplace to question an economic system initially presented as reliable source of rising prosperity that now seemed horribly vulnerable to the caprice of its operating elite and rigged to benefit the same tiny group while living standards stagnated or fell for the remaining 99 per cent.

We live in an age of institutional fragility.

If institutional failure has eroded the primacy of truth, so too has the multi-billion-dollar industry of misinformation, false propaganda and phony science that has arisen in the recent years. The systematic spread of falsehood by front organisations is acting on behalf of vested interests that wish to suppress accurate information or to prevent others acting upon it.

This assault has its primarly roots in the launch of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee in 1954. This was designed to sabotage public confidence and establish a false equivalence between those scientists who detected a link between tobacco use and lung cancer.

Source:[1]

The industry campaign worked to create a scientific controversy through a program that depended on the creation of industry–academic conflicts of interest. This strategy of producing scientific uncertainty undercut public health efforts and regulatory interventions designed to reduce the harms of smoking. A number of industries have subsequently followed this approach to disrupting normative science. Claims of scientific uncertainty and lack of proof also lead to the assertion of individual responsibility for industrially produced health risks.

Source:[3]

This approach worked so well that the tactics were copied by the climate-change deniers. ExxonMobil (one of the world's largest publicity traded international oil and gas companies) knew 30 years ago that the climate change was real but they were donating a ton of money to a whole DENIALIST PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN because they're making money off fossil fuels. Those tactics were borrowed by political operatives who wanted to use it to argue about the size of their inauguration or whether they actually won an election.

Source:[4]

The media, especially twenty-four-hour new channels, are constantly hungry for confrontation, which often creates the illusion of a contest between equally legitimate positions.

On the media an evidence-based public policy can be undermined by the alignment of well-crafted propaganda and ideological predisposition.

This happed in the case of "Obamacare" when the myth of "death panels" achieved exactly this goal.

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity' in society.

This was claimed in a Facebook post in 2009 by Sarah Palin, the former Governator of Alaska.

This was of course a grotesque distortion of the bill's proposal to offer voluntary counselling to Medicare patients on living wills, end-of-life care and palliative treatment. There were no plans for "death panels" and never had been. But the phrase of Sarah Palin had deep emotional and ideological resonance with those predispose to distrust healthcare reform and to interpret it as an un-American, proto-socialist measure. A week after her post, almost 90% of Americans were aware of her warning, and three out of ten said that they believed it.
The purpose of these campaigns of disinformation is invariably to sow doubts rather than to triumph outright in the court of public opinion. As the institutions that traditionally act as social arbiters have been progressively discredited and mistrust, so well-funded pressure groups have encouraged the public to question the existence of conclusively reliable truth.
Consequently, the normal practice of adversarial debate is morphing into an UNHEALTHY RELATIVISM. The point is simply to keep the argument going, to ensure that it never reaches a conclusion.

Source:[1]