This madness arguably represents the greatest threat to the Western world at this moment of history, because when we allow our shared reality to become so splintered and our culture so tribalized, it becomes nearly impossible for us to muster the political will required for us to begin addressing the most serious existential challenges of our time — from climate change to ecological collapse to terrorism, wealth inequality, and sex trafficking.
“I summarized this postmodern disaster with the term “aperspectival madness” because the belief that there is no truth—that no perspective has universal validity (the “aperspectival” part)—when pushed to extremes, as postmodernism was about to do, resulted in massive self-contradictions and ultimate incoherency (the “madness” part). And when aperspectival madness infects the leading-edge of evolution, evolution’s capacity for self-direction and self-organization collapses.” (Ken Wilber, Trump and a Post-Truth World).
In 2018, the dangerous epidemic of aperspectival madness is being weaponized by foreign intelligence and sociopathic organizations like Cambridge Analytica who take advantage of our confirmation biases, our anti-intellectualism and the Dunning-Kruger effect by targeting vulnerable minds and flooding their networks with fake news and phony conspiracy theories, all intended to distract us from the genuine conspiracies that are taking place right before our eyes. The rise of aperspectival madness makes it more difficult to tell manufactured conspiracies for real conspiracies. This confusion may very well be the intended outcome — to insulate genuinely malicious conspiracies from accountability with a cushion of plausible deniability.
There is a new kind of madness spreading through our world, one that is eroding the very foundations of Western civilization. It is a madness that naturally arises when our trust in journalistic institutions, in our governing bodies, and in democracy itself is deluged by an endless stream of lies, propaganda, and deliberately partial truths flowing into our social media networks. It is an assault on truthfulness, all in the name of “truth” — a war on reality being waged by corporate interests, political opportunists, and internet trolls. This madness has a name: aperspectival madness, the complete and total flattening of perspective and deconstruction of truth. It's ultimate outcome may be to dislodge a large enough plurality of the population from any semblance of “shared reality” by eroding its trust in the very pillars that support and sustain our civilization,
Objective facts and sound verification procedures are not what post-truth groups deplore but, specifically, what drives their dissent. What post-truth groups do deplore are established facts and agreed-upon truths. The issue is one of trust, not verification. There’s nothing new in relying on authority for establishing truths. But insofar as post-truth is a new reality rather than an old but now more visible one, its novelty resides in distrusting established guarantors of truth, in part simply because they are established, while trusting grassroots observations over the venerable edifices of science and religion. While the appearance is one of subjectivity, it is driven, paradoxically, by a search for objectivity.