“Opposing the Power of Lies, Bullshit and Fake News: the Value of Truth” by Alison MacKenzie and Ibrar Bhatt: Summary and Critique

🧠 Truth as Intrinsic and Instrumental Value

“Truth has considerable intrinsic and instrumental value that should be protected and respected” (MacKenzie & Bhatt, 2019, p. 1).
Truth is not only useful for practical decision-making but also essential for democratic life, institutional legitimacy, and personal integrity.

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📉 The Post-Truth Era Undermines Democracy

“‘Post-truth’ politics poses a serious challenge to the values of truth, and consequently trust” (p. 1).
“Brexit is one of the greatest victories… by the forces of illiberal authoritarianism” (Dougan & O’Brien, 2019, p. 203).
Misinformation, fantasy, and scapegoating used during Brexit expose a broader erosion of democratic principles.

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📱 Digital Information Ecosystem Amplifies Falsehoods

“Our often unwitting reliance on algorithms to curate our newsfeeds can also be problematic” (p. 3).
“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about” (Frankfurt, 2005, p. 63).
The postdigital condition accelerates the spread of lies and bullshit via social media, aided by platform algorithms.

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🧩 Distinguishing Lies, Bullshit, and Truth

“The liar intends… to deceive… The bullshitter… is not guided by the authority of truth” (Frankfurt, 2005, pp. 51–54).
“Lies… pollute personal and public life, and place a limit on what we can effectively and reasonably do” (p. 3).
While lies are intentional deceptions, bullshit is indifferent to truth altogether—yet both are corrosive to public discourse.

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🧪 The Epistemological Foundations of Truth

“Rather than formally engaging in a precise account of what truth means… it entails qualities such as ‘sincerity’, ‘accuracy’, ‘trust’” (p. 4).
“We need the right reasons to believe that something is true… respect for facts, for accuracy, and for honest, objective reporting” (p. 5).
Truth is difficult to define, but foundational to epistemology. The article supports a pragmatic, fact-responsive approach.

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🧱 Erosion of Trust in Experts and Institutions

“We are being asked to distrust the authority of experts to speak on issues about which they know a great deal” (p. 6).
“Michael Gove… ‘we have had enough of experts’” (cited in MacKenzie & Bhatt, 2019, p. 6).
Political rhetoric has dangerously devalued expertise, fostering suspicion and intellectual relativism.

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⚖️ Ethics of Lying and the Moral Demand for Truthfulness

“When we lie, we intentionally deceive by stating something we know to be untrue” (Bok, 1989, p. 12).
“To deny obvious facts is to succumb to irrationality” (MacKenzie & Bhatt, 2019, p. 8).
The ethical domain demands that we respect truthfulness. Lying damages both interpersonal and societal trust.

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🔍 Truth vs. Relativism and Subjective Narratives

“What marks something as a truth… is that a truth embodies facts and value judgements” (p. 10).
“Truth… is not mysterious… We know what it means to seek and state the truth” (Williams, 2002, cited on p. 4).
The authors reject extreme relativism. While interpretation is inevitable, there are still standards for verifying truth.

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🧱 Historical Manipulation as a Tool of Power

“Orwell was alarmed that the reporting… was not only factually wrong, it was intentionally wrong” (p. 12).
“The lie would become truth” (Orwell, 1968, p. 258).
Using Orwell’s fears, the article warns against the rewriting of history and how manipulated truths can become dominant narratives.

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🧭 The Role of Education and Reflexivity

“Educators have a vital role to play in helping an informed public navigate what it encounters online” (p. 13).
“We must continue to advance knowledge and understanding, as truthfully, critically and rigorously as we possibly can” (p. 14).
Educators must not only teach critical literacy but also model truthfulness, resilience, and reflexive inquiry in the postdigital age.

📚 Narrative Theory: Reconstructing Truth in Competing Storyworlds

“Narratives that make up Brexit, for example, were animated by disinformation, scapegoating, fantasy and blame” (MacKenzie & Bhatt, 2019, p. 1).
The article contributes to narrative theory by showing how false narratives in political discourse (e.g. Brexit) are structured and deployed. It reveals how truth and lies function as narrative strategies, constructing competing “realities” for ideological purposes.

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🧠 Epistemological Criticism: Truth, Knowledge, and Textual Authority

“Rather than formally engaging in a precise account of what truth means… we follow Williams… who argues for sincerity, accuracy and trust” (p. 4).
The work adds to epistemological literary criticism by arguing for a moral and structural need for truth in interpretation, pushing back against radical textual relativism. It affirms that not all interpretations are equally valid, especially in politically charged narratives.

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🕵️ Ideology Critique: Language, Power, and Manipulation

“Post-truth… has created a toxic brew of fantasy, denial, and propaganda” (p. 1).
“Orwell was alarmed… that the reporting of events was intentionally wrong and that the lie would become truth” (p. 12).
Aligning with Marxist and ideological criticism, the article shows how language is weaponized to distort reality, normalize deceit, and consolidate political power. The invocation of Orwell strengthens the critique of hegemonic discourse.

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🗣️ Discourse Theory: Postdigital Communication and the Production of Meaning

“The postdigital is already here… We rely on algorithms to curate our newsfeeds” (p. 3).
The article expands discourse theory by exploring how truth claims are now formed within digitally mediated discourses, shaped by platforms, algorithms, and echo chambers. This advances literary theory’s understanding of contextualized meaning-making.

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📺 Media Theory: Intersections of Text, Truth, and Technology

“Fake news is not only a symptom of failing democracies, it is also a digital affordance of post-truth politics” (p. 2).
The work enriches media and cultural theory by framing fake news as a media-textual phenomenon, produced and consumed within specific postdigital infrastructures—inviting literary scholars to treat digital texts as critical objects of study.

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🧱 Ethical Criticism: Moral Responsibilities of the Writer and Reader

“Truthfulness is a virtue, a basic requirement of political and ethical life” (p. 4).
The authors reassert the place of ethical literary criticism, urging scholars and educators to reclaim the value of truth as a narrative and pedagogical commitment—countering postmodern tendencies to view all texts as equally valid expressions.

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📖 Historiographic Metafiction: Fictionalizing the Past

“The past was whatever the Party chose to make it… the lie would become truth” (Orwell, 1968, cited p. 12).
The article indirectly contributes to historiographic metafiction theory by analyzing how history is re-narrated in the image of political interests—blurring fact and fiction in ways that resonate with postmodern literary concerns.

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🎭 Poststructuralism: The Limits of Relativism

“Not all truths are created equal… truth and trust are necessary if we are to live with others peacefully” (p. 13).
While engaging with poststructuralist debates on truth and meaning, the authors push back against total relativism, reinforcing that language may be unstable, but ethical and factual constraints still matter in interpretive acts.

⚖️ Moral Absolutism: Oversimplifying Complex Epistemologies

The article leans toward a morally absolutist view of truth, potentially dismissing nuanced postmodern and poststructuralist arguments that truth is socially constructed and contingent.

While aiming to defend truth, the authors risk ignoring the productive ambiguity that drives much of literary, philosophical, and cultural theory.

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🧭 Lack of Engagement with Opposing Philosophical Theories

The article references Frankfurt and Williams approvingly but largely ignores or glosses over counter-theories, such as Foucault’s or Derrida’s critiques of power-knowledge and truth regimes.
This weakens the academic depth of the argument by not grappling with the full spectrum of truth-related discourse.

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🕹️ Technological Determinism: Blaming the Medium, Not the Message

The authors tend to frame digital technologies as key enablers of lies and bullshit, which could be criticized as technologically deterministic.

Social media algorithms are not inherently deceptive; it is their usage and regulation that matters.

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🧱 Binary Framing of Truth vs. Falsehood

The article adopts a binary opposition—truth vs. lies/bullshit—which may not capture the messy, contested space of political and literary truth-claims.

Truth can exist in gradations, provisional forms, or culturally embedded frames, which the article does not fully acknowledge.

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📉 Limited Empirical Support for Claims

Although rhetorically persuasive, the article lacks empirical evidence to support broad statements (e.g., on Brexit, public trust, digital epistemologies).

Critics may argue that the authors’ claims are more philosophical than data-driven, which limits practical applicability.

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🧠 Underexploration of Emotional Truths and Lived Experience

The emphasis on factual truth could be critiqued for excluding the legitimacy of emotional or experiential truths, especially in marginalized communities.

Not all truths can be empirically validated; affective and subjective dimensions of truth deserve recognition in postdigital societies.

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📚 Educational Overreach: Idealism over Realism

While calling on educators to model truthfulness is inspiring, some may argue the authors place too much burden on education to counter systemic propaganda, without addressing broader political or economic reforms.

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🔁 Circular Justification of Truth’s Value

The article sometimes asserts that truth is valuable because democracy needs it—without fully justifying why democracy should be the benchmark system.

This can be seen as circular reasoning: democracy needs truth, therefore truth is good.