Condoms and the meta truth

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 05/02/2025

The minimum aspiration of the citizens of the few liberal democracies that exist in the world is that their rulers are informed about the actions of their government and the consequences of their actions. However, it seems that the mass of Meta-Truth seems to have swallowed up the brains of our rulers and their operators.

Last week, the entire United States reacted furiously against what was clearly a deadly waste of those citizen contributions called taxes when both the White House communications director Karoline Leavitt and the president of the country, Donald J. Trump, stated that the international cooperation agency US AID was under review after the discovery of a payment of US $ 50 million to buy condoms for Gaza. The debate became furious and depending on which side of the spectrum you were on, it was said that these accessories were necessary to protect victims of rape by Hamas or the Israeli army.

Thanks to the fact that there are still journalists trained in the ethics of Walter Conkrite, the Reuters agency broke the furious debate by announcing that there was not a single proof of such a purchase. Later, the British press clarified what apparently no one in the United States wanted to clarify. There is a region called Gaza in Mozambique, a nation located on the eastern coast of Africa, and in Gaza of Mozambique, AIDS is at work. The condoms were part of a prophylactic campaign for Gaza of Mozambique, not Gaza of the Middle East.

This episode makes me think about how destructive the absence of attachment to the truth in public information can be for the democratic fabric of any country. As Walter Lippman said, “The defense of truth is essential because we know how porous we are to environmental information in the constitution of our internal opinion of the landscape, and how absurd it is to consider ourselves as having a firm and final understanding of reality when the entire history of our species is the history of misinterpretation and pseudo-reality firmly held as truth.

This pseudo-reality that Lippmann refers to is nothing other than what is now called Meta-Truth or Post-Truth. Both names conceal a horrendous reality. It is a lie dressed up in Chanel clothes. And the attractiveness of the clothes conceals a lethal poison: that of constructing realities based on lies whose short existence incites discord; sharpens disagreements and destroys bridges for understanding.

We are returning to the stage where lighting up the Library of Alexandria is acceptable in order to prevent the creation of knowledge from undermining the power bases of lodges that form around government positions and which would have no place in a world where transparency prevails.

And one wonders if there is an antidote to this evil. The answer lies in the Middle Ages. When both Christians and Muslims began to destroy the sources of knowledge, the creators of knowledge took refuge in convents and from there they not only protected knowledge but enriched and expanded it.

Today, convents are private, non-profit think tanks that bring together like-minded beings and, above all, those for whom truth is the ultimate goal of all communication. Only they can effectively combat this rain of post-truths that is launched daily by a kind of modern minstrels who are now called influencers and who, like their ancestors, launch messages without understanding their substance or verifying their authenticity. And these proliferate on social networks, which, unlike traditional media, do not have an editorial board to supervise them; they do not have to confront an editor-in-chief or the possibility of being sued for defamation. In this way, they contaminate cybernetic distribution networks with distortions of the truth; pugnacity and violence without any limits.

Their days, however, are numbered because advances in Artificial Intelligence are going to occupy the influencers' stage. But there is still some time to go, so we will have to continue taking refuge in Think Tanks and resorting to the channels of Artificial Intelligence to take down influencers and conspiracy theorists.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».