More than an infodemic
Pandemic, pos-truth and the dangers of irrationalism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18861/ic.2022.17.1.3227Keywords:
post-truth, pandemic, digital society, irrationalismAbstract
The pandemic reveals the post-truth condition and the crisis of trust and conflicts between multiple forms of expertise, including those of the health sciences, which make it difficult to solve planetary problems. The posttruth analysis of the pandemic allows us to understand essential aspects of contemporary public communication: the (dis) informational disorder, the questions and conflicts about expertise, and the mixed consequences
that the abundance of communication brings to face common problems such as health global public. The pandemic demonstrates the problems for the collective use of public reason. Public reason demands communicative conditions, such as truthful information, epistemological agreements on data and facts, and citizen participation. However, public communication, fractured and fragmented, without norms of participation or shared epistemological principles, dynamites the chances of achieving significant consensus on a variety of topics: the identification of problems, the diagnosis of causes, the debate of solutions. The propaganda stubbornness of power added to irrational currents that question essential aspects of the pandemic, such as its existence, origin, methods of care and resolution, expose this problem. These conflicts are traversed by contemporary communication chaos that, as well as enhances opportunities for expression, also makes it difficult to find consensus. The problem is that the resolution of public goods presupposes basic consensus on shared mechanisms for public debate and principles for determining and resolving common goods.
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