There is increasing alarm at the rise of a post-truth doctrine of alternative facts, currently flourishing most notably in the populist contexts of Trump’s ascendance and the recent Brexit campaign. Just one example, from too many of late, comes from White House spokesperson Sean Spicer’s stunning statement about the Trump inauguration: it drew ‘the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period’.1 This lie was so spectacularly brazen – and futile – that it went beyond the realm of any rationalization in terms of PR spin or wishful thinking. What is happening?
The situation in US politics may feel unprecedented, but alternative facts are not new. The phenomenon should be familiar in essence: a person asserts something which is plainly false – or at least, is not what it seems – yet asks people to believe it. Anthropologist Chris Knight and colleagues argue that this ‘collective deception’ is the very basis of symbolic culture in our species.2 Groups of people tacitly agree to act as if certain statements were true, yet the truth of those statements cannot be demonstrated, and the evidence may in fact be to the contrary. For creationists, life on earth was created by a divine being. For middle-class Laotians, having a new motorcar blessed by monks will reduce the risk of car accidents. For the Dorze people of southern Ethiopia, the local leopards are devout Christians. Rather than take this last statement to be true – in the scientific sense that it yields predictions that cannot be falsified by evidence – anthropologist Dan Sperber analysed it as symbolism.3
