In April, the UK’s House of Commons had been shocked into a moment of uncharacteristic silence when a Scottish parliamentarian had asked Boris Johnson, ‘Are you a liar, Prime Minister?’

Earlier this month, one of the presenters of the BBC’s flagship morning news programme Today tossed the following blinder at a startled British Cabinet minister: ‘The Prime Minister’s broken a promise on overseas aid. He broke his promise on the fact that there would be a border on the Irish Sea. He is now breaking his promise on tax. He is about to break his promise on pensions. Does he care whether what he says is ever actually enacted?’

Prime Minister Johnson has been renowned for his ambiguous relationship with accountability, reliability, and factual accuracy, ever since the late 1980s, when, as an aspiring journalist, he was fired from a post on The Times newspaper for fabricating a quotation. More recently, the veracity of his assertions in relation to the resourcing of Britain’s National Health Service, the impacts of Brexit, his own financial arrangements and his handling of the pandemic has come under increased scrutiny. This latest controversy relates to his breach of promises on guarantees of state pension levels and increases in the direct taxation of earnt income.

But what, one might be forgiven for asking, does this matter in the world today? In the so-called ‘post-truth’ age, isn’t all this nonsense pretty much par for the course? Where’s the harm in one more piece of fake news, here or there?

Mr. Johnson’s apparent disingenuousness is not after all entirely out of kilter with the zeitgeist of contemporary culture. A certain mode of cynical relativism has grown in prevalence in recent years, underpinned by a sense (fostered by social media) that reality comprises an often contradictory sequence of subjective perspectives (indeed, an agglomeration of uninformed personal opinions masquerading as information) rather than a coherent set of objective facts. While this argument might in itself hold some radical philosophical merit, it may nevertheless also been seen as serving the interests of various forms of material power.

Let us then assume, for a moment, that nothing is intrinsically true. In doing so, let’s accept for now that all knowledge is skewed by power: that is, that what knowledge is, is what power has decreed to be true.

The English philosopher Francis Bacon famously remarked at the end of the sixteenth century that knowledge itself is power. Four hundred years later, the French historian Michel Foucault argued that it is the presence of power which designates, through that complex of lenses and filters which constitutes its view upon the world, what is generally accepted as knowledge. Power reinforces its own position through that knowledge, and reproduces knowledge in line with the needs of its own strategic purposes. Foucault thus supposed that ‘truth is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint’ and charted how those forms of constraint are perpetuated by the relentless structuring of what is perceived as truth.

That which is recognized and valorized as scientific knowledge in one age and situation may, therefore, as Galileo and Darwin understood, be considered heresy or madness in another. The history of science is not a set of incontrovertible truths but a sequence of interlocking and conflicting narratives which repeatedly return to contradict each other and themselves. As Newton, Einstein, and Heisenberg might attest, there is no single, immutable, unequivocal scientific orthodoxy. This much has of course been particularly evident in both the political and the public responses to the scientific narratives which have developed around Covid-19 – and in the often overt politicization of those narratives.

This doesn’t justify but might help us to understand, the catalysts and provocations behind, for instance, the series of apparently preposterous conspiracy theories which have arisen around the virus and its vaccines. If medical science is, as the political theorist Louis Althusser might have said, an ‘ideological state apparatus’ – if it is merely another mechanism (like religion, education and the media) whereby the political-economic power of the state asserts its ideological control over its citizens – then we surely should not take for granted the absolute and permanent accuracy and impartiality of its pronouncements. 

Under normal circumstances, a reasonable degree of mistrust in overarching assertions of unquestionable fact might represent a healthy scepticism. However, in the extreme, life-or-death conditions of a global pandemic, we tend, for the most part, to assume a pragmatic acceptance of the virtual apotheosis of medical science and the exigencies of our total submission to its guidance (echoed in that convenient mantra of governments that their Covid response policies will unambiguously and consistently ‘follow the science’). However, this almost universal acceptance might in itself eventually prompt some normally sensible individuals to begin to question the infallibility of scientists, the motivations of the profit-oriented pharmaceutical industries and the intentions of typically self-serving politicians. 

There is, however, a proper time for the deconstructionist tactics of epistemological relativism; and that time is not perhaps at a point in history when many hundreds of thousands of people will die if we allow ourselves the luxury of such intellectual pedantries and procrastinations. We may also note that those who view the discursive knowledge-nexus as irreversibly serving the interests of hegemonic power frequently fail to observe that they are themselves part of such a nexus, and that therefore their own claims to unique truth are themselves intrinsically underpinned by ideological and economic interests. 

That much is true (or is at least situationally applicable and appropriate) whether those are the interests of London, Washington or Beijing – or of those zealots protesting in the streets against lockdowns and vaccination campaigns – whether they are screaming that Covid-19 can be spread by the proliferation of mobile telephone masts or can be cured by subcutaneous infusions of bleach or sunlight (yes, ladies and gentlemen, that was the President of the United States speaking). These extreme and often paranoid responses are clearly the product of desperation and dread; and, although such responses may reasonably incur our profound disapproval, in these almost unprecedentedly anxious days we might all be able to understand the conditions which provoked them. 

The craziest notions of course sometimes contain kernels of truth. Donald Trump last year declared that Covid-19 had been created in a Chinese laboratory, possibly as part of a military programme to bio-engineer and weaponize the virus. Mr. Trump’s numerous opponents ridiculed this view as a characteristically absurd piece of paranoid thinking, comparable with insane claims that this particular type of coronavirus had been manufactured by Bill Gates as part of a long-term strategy to embed everyone with Microsoft nanochips secreted in Covid vaccines. At the end of last month, however, a wide-ranging report published by American intelligence agencies concluded that, though the pandemic had clearly not been created as part of a germ warfare programme, and although its origins were most likely through natural transmission from the animal world, the idea that it had leaked accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was still not entirely implausible.

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The Chinese government has meanwhile been selling its own people the story that the illness had originated in the United States. In other news, we hear that North Korea hasn’t of course needed to implement a programme of mass vaccination as it hasn’t (as it’s repeatedly declared) seen a single case of contagion. (And, given their tendency to waive the requirement for their own adherence to the self-isolation protocols of contact-tracing mechanisms, one might be forgiven for presuming that British government ministers are apparently immune to the capacity to transmit the infection to anyone else.)

Many such assertions and intimations have of course been purely propagandistic, facts spun out of scant evidence in bids to reinforce the perspectives and positions of established power, or in attempts to usurp or undermine those positions. In July, for example, thousands of demonstrators at an anti-vax rally in London’s Trafalgar Square cheered as they heard health workers compared to those Nazi war criminals who were condemned to hang at Nuremberg. Last month in central London, anti-vaccination protesters besieged the headquarters of a major broadcast news organisation and screamed abuse at its journalists; they also invaded the former centre of BBC television in the mistaken belief that it was still the headquarters of the corporation. 

Earlier this month, Pope Francis expressed some concern as to the levels of vaccine-hesitancy among certain Cardinals of the Roman Catholic church, referring to one senior figure who had been critical of vaccination campaigns and who had himself ended up in intensive care with Covid-19. At the end of last month, a former vaccine sceptic who, having also become ill, had very publicly announced that he had been mistaken and that people should of course receive their Covid jabs, died of the disease. The 40-year-old Englishman had said that he had originally refused the opportunity to be inoculated against coronavirus after having had his understanding distorted by the spread of conspiracy theories so common across social media.

There are those who’ve meanwhile condemned those same social media platforms for censoring messages that spread anti-vaccination propaganda. They suggest that an unqualified respect for freedom of expression – no matter how irrational, manipulative, malicious or damaging that expression may be – is the greatest value we should hold, and that this freedom should never be allowed to be limited by even the direst concerns. Many of those individuals also tend to spread disinformation knowingly designed to endanger countless numbers of human lives.

The nature of truth is certainly a complex, controversial and problematic commodity, and its qualities will no doubt continue to be debated by philosophers until the end of our civilizations. It seems fair enough to admit that scientific rationalism isn’t the only way (nor is it a uniquely perfect way) to see the world. But, just for once, it might be worth allowing our revolutionary intellectual principles to be temporarily compromised; and, just for a while, we might permit ourselves to ditch our resistance to the authority of established experts, and to let pragmatic common sense continue to save our societies and our lives. We can all afford to save Foucault for another day.

We clearly need to smarten up (and to secure and validate our sources of knowledge) in order to combat the tides of disinformation which digital platforms proliferate hour by hour. Fuelled so often by hatred and fear, conspiracy theories abound almost unstoppably through the ether; and their impacts may prove devastating. Earlier this month, for example, a survey conducted by academics at University College London found that the majority of schoolteachers in England lack the historical knowledge necessary to counter popular myths, misconceptions and falsehoods that have grown around the Final Solution, and therefore fail to wield the educational tools essential ‘to prevent the repetition of similar atrocities in the future’.

Open-mindedness is invaluable; but to adhere inflexibly and without question to a paranoid worldview, to the exclusion of empirical facts, isn’t to be open to challenging new ideas but to be closed to rational engagement and to align oneself with such absurd and dangerous delusions as those which have supposed 9/11 and the assassination of JFK to have been orchestrated by the CIA or the Elders of Zion, which have immediately equated the Taliban with Daesh and Al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and which have proposed that the pyramids were built by aliens and that the last living descendant of Jesus of Nazareth is a senior figure in Freemasonry in France. 

The truth may, as they say, be out there, but for the while at least let’s do our best to distance ourselves from the ravings of that prominent British conspiracy theorist (whom we’ll not dignify by naming) who has called both the Covid-19 crisis and the climate emergency hoaxes, has claimed vaccines represent a secret campaign of genetic modification, and has declared that the world is run by a cabal of reptilian extra-terrestrials. 

We should, in short, be able to remain open-minded without losing our minds and surrendering our reason to the stratagems of charlatans, demagogues, lunatics and idiots. It’s high time for our world to stop giving credence, platforms and the oxygen of airtime to such stupid cults, to those who’d, for example, deny the realities of the pandemic, climate change or genocides. It’s well past time for our species to start wising up. 

In the United States, the complex of bizarre conspiracy claims that comes together under the name of ‘QAnon’ has supposed that Donald Trump has been waging a secret war against an all-powerful set of Washington-based Satanist paedophiles, and that Covid vaccines have been designed to control the minds of the peoples of the world. This eccentric sect – which has gained extraordinary traction amongst its many disciples – even purports that Joe Biden’s inauguration was faked so that Mr. Trump could covertly deploy his continuing powers as the American president (an office he still holds) in order to effect the arrest and execution of his devil-worshipping, child-abusing enemies, including such figures as his former rival Hillary Clinton. This is not merely a movement of armchair activists: QAnon fanatics led the violent attack on the US Capitol at the start of this year, an attempted insurrection against American democracy itself. In its scale QAnon has been comparable with any mass movement (boosted by international support, its social media following has run into the millions); in its scope and intent, it might be compared with the Helter Skelter hysteria of Charles Manson’s murderous cult.

After the madness of the Trump era, however, there is now some small cause for optimism. Just over a week ago, demonstrators continuing to adhere to the theory that Mr. Trump’s re-election victory was stolen from him through a conspiracy of epic proportions (yet one for which no evidence exists) – and claiming that the 600 or so protesters charged for their actions during January’s storming of the Capitol were the ‘political prisoners’ of an illegitimate regime – again descended upon the avenues of Washington DC. On this occasion, however, only a few hundred people turned up. 

Perhaps this suggests that the insanities of recent years might be starting to recede. But then, the paranoiacs would insist, of course, I’d say that – if I myself were one of those elite satanic alien reptiloids!