Anti vaccination.

Climate change denial.

Flat earth.

Creation science.

Trickle-down economics.

Refugees are a threat.

Wind power is unreliable.

Carbon prices will ruin the economy.

Higher wages kill jobs.

Anti-facts are ruling. Which is to say, lies drive our society today.

Much of the social and political discourse in the West has devolved to people shouting obvious falsehoods.

Sometimes it’s funny, like the flat-earthers taking a cruise to search for the edge of the world.

But all too often, belief in anti-facts turns downright dangerous. Measles outbreaks in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere are the results of people who refuse to vaccinate their children, claiming “My child, my right.” But it’s not just your child, just my child; that decision affects people around you, with dire impacts on the most vulnerable.

And more and more, venal politicians are repeating and amplifying these lies, taking advantage of the poor people who believe them to build their own bases and leverage that to take power.

Nothing new here

There is nothing new about any of these ideas. I remember occasionally finding poorly printed tracts at my grandparents’ house, warning about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or about communists being the real proponents of universal health care, and that would lead to our being conquered by Russia.

Even at the age of seven or eight, I recognized how amateurish these things were. And all the grown-ups I asked about them dismissed their authors as nuts and cranks.

But even so, they persist.

Oh, oh—something has changed

Today, rather than—or perhaps in addition to—cheap printing, these ideas find distribution over the Internet. Social media has amplified them, and enabled their authors to find people around the world who will choose to buy into their lies.

Celebrity culture was like nuclear power for the especially stupid anti-vaccination movement, when an otherwise obscure Hollywood actor used her profile to spread the false idea that vaccinations cause autism.

Another new trend is the way these adherents abuse free speech, freedom of religion and other civil protections to defend opinions based on falsehood. Religious groups in the U.S. force teachers to give the same support to the idea that God created the world in six days as they do for science.

Politics versus science

Politicians spreading anti-facts is nothing new. There are examples through history. It’s a sad fact of history that demagogues have driven people to massacres and genocide by stating that a group is a threat to general society.

Today, some politicians continue to demonize gay people. Prohibiting same-sex marriage benefits no one—heterosexual people are free to marry, or not, as they wish. So why spend so much time and energy to take rights away from people? Because the effort gives the politician a following. The end is power and wealth for the leader.

Around the world, we have politicians arguing against clear evidence pointing to the climate crisis we are on the brink of. The world is warmer than it was 100 years ago, even 30 years ago. There is no factual argument against this. And all the evidence points to the fact that the amount of carbon dioxide we’ve been spewing into the atmosphere and the oceans are the cause. This also has other effects that threaten our survival as a society and as a species.

But politicians argue against it, and spread falsehoods that others, for some reason, support. “Environment protection will kill jobs.”

To detour from this argument for a moment, how about this: instead of investing billions in oil pipelines that will only further damage the only environment we have to live in, we invest that money in developing alternative forms of energy so that we can continue to live?

Every technological shift has killed some jobs. How many typesetters can you find today? But new technologies have always created more jobs and more prosperity than they obviated.

We’re teetering on the edge

Jane Jacobs was right: we are approaching a new dark age.

But it’s not a result of hyper-specialization. It’s because we as a society have abandoned the benefits of the Enlightenment. It’s our intellectual and spiritual laziness. It’s out abandonment of facts and our unwillingness to carefully think an issue through. It’s our unwillingness to think for ourselves, and to believe pretty people.

It’s our willingness to be manipulated by the wealthiest, who apparently cannot see past the ends of their noses.