Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It: Summary & Key Insights

Before we blame the internet or politicians for creating post-truth, we should remember that persuasion and deception have always walked beside power. From the propaganda of wartime governments to the subtle public relations of corporations, the boundary between truth and distortion has long been porous. What distinguishes our current moment is not the mere existence of spin, but its speed, scale, and saturation.

In earlier decades, journalists and editors served as imperfect gatekeepers between public figures and citizens. When information needed to pass through limited broadcast channels and printed columns, the friction of verification slowed the flow of nonsense. After the digital revolution, that filtering collapsed. Social media fractured the shared informational space into millions of self-curated bubbles. The democratization of speech empowered truth-tellers—but also unleashed charlatans with equal force. Our culture, already prone to embellishment, became drenched in slogans and simplified truths.

I trace this shift not to a moral decline, but to an environment where honesty competes with entertainment. When airtime and attention are currency, exaggeration sells. 'Bullshit,' as the philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined it, is speech intended to persuade without concern for truth. We live in a marketplace saturated with such speech, not because we’ve become inherently deceitful, but because the incentives now reward fluency over fidelity. The history of truth in public life, in this respect, is a story of technological and institutional evolution. We have entered a phase where truth, although still valued, is no longer structurally protected.

Our minds are not cold calculating machines; they are emotional heat engines. Every political campaigner, advertiser, and media strategist knows this. One of the foundations of the post-truth condition lies in our cognitive architecture: we crave stories that make us feel something. When a factual argument clashes with an emotionally resonant one, emotion almost always wins.

During the Brexit campaign, for instance, the rhetoric of sovereignty and control reached deeper into the emotional psyche of voters than any statistical forecast could. Similarly, in American politics, identity-based appeals overshadowed policy details. I’m not suggesting that emotion is unwelcome—on the contrary, emotional resonance gives human meaning to facts. But when emotion becomes detached from evidence, when it becomes the sole criterion for belief, our collective reasoning falters.

In this book, I argue that we must not condemn emotion but learn to recognize its primacy. The post-truth world thrives when people forget that strong feelings can coexist with weak evidence. The most common forms of misinformation trade not in data but in moral engagement—stories designed to make you angry, fearful, or proud. The challenge is not to suppress these feelings, but to remain vigilant about how they are used.

From my own experience broadcasting challenging stories, I have learned how tone, framing, and imagery can steer perception more than fact. A graph might present accuracy; a photograph can bend reality. Understanding this dynamic empowers us to guard against being emotionally hijacked, transforming emotion from a manipulative tool into a diagnostic signal.