Post-truth and Dystopia

Abstract

In our post-modern society a new concept has emerged significantly: posttruth. For the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective post-truth refers to circumstances that indicate that objective facts have less infl uence on the formation of public opinion than emotional appeals and personal beliefs. It does not seem very likely that Donald Trump has read philosophers such POSVERDAD Y DISTOPÍA | 675 as Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault, however the connection, fostered by them, between post-truth and an atmosphere of post-modern thought, is clear. Aside from Trump’s unfounded fake-news and the Brexiters, the intensification of misleading campaigns in other countries such as Russia, Hungary or Turkey continues to be denounced. Also, in Spain we must notice the so-called ‘procés’ in Catalonia. The novelistic genre of dystopia has already a broad corpus. The post-truth issue finds its first dystopian basis in the novel 1984 by George Orwell, published in 1949, although the first book in the series was We by Yevgueni Zamiatin, in 1924. Between both dystopias, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, in 1932, whose title taken from Shakespeare suggests a seemingly kind tyranny, but in it post-truth also appe