I blame the spin doctors

People have started talking about the post-factual society, mainly in despair. Basically voters have stopped listening to “facts” and will now form their opinion based on feeling, which is for instance why England voted in favour of Brexit in spite of practically all serious politicians and academics being against it.

It’s a natural development, however. When politicians started hiding behind spin doctors and got extremely good at never answering a question with a straight answer, at the same time as the media stopped doing costly investigative journalism and started reprinting press releases most of the time, things started falling apart.

Politicians and spin doctors might truthfully say that they never actually lie, but if they cover up their intentions up in so much spin that only the 2% of the population actually understand what they’re saying, they might as well be lying. For instance, if a politician makes it sound as if they’re about to restrict immigration, does it really matter they’re actually saying they’re unable to do so for many good reasons if hardly anybody gets it? If the vast majority of voters believe that the politician said they were going to restrict immigration, what will they think when the politician admits five years later that immigration figures are up instead? That the politician was lying, of course.

(Because of all grants academics have to apply for these days to keep their job, it’s now sadly also often hard to get a straight answer out of them, and similar things apply to most other people in the media.)

The result is, of course, that most voters sadly think that politicians are lying bastards and that you cannot trust a word they say. And of course, in that situation you might as well listen to the ones that are fun or say something different.

Also, if you think of politicians as part of the elite, you can even get the idea that if they’re all in favour of something, it must be a secret elitist plan, and so it must necessarily be in the interest of the rest of us to vote for the exact opposite.

The problem here is that Brexit will most likely be a complete disaster, a wasted decade (if not a century), a source of xenophobia and missed opportunities, and in general just the opposite of what normal people need. The elite will be fine, but it’ll be harder and dearer to go on holiday abroad, there will be fewer jobs, and nobody will stop the Tories from taking away our human rights. In this case the voters ought to have listened to the politicians and to the experts, but how were they to know they’re weren’t just spinning.

I blame the spin doctors. They created this post-factual society.

We live in a real world, however, and eventually the chickens will come home to roost.

I really worry what will happen in England once the Brexit voters realise that they’re the ones who’ll have to pay the bill. Will there be more racist attacks? Or even riots?

I just hope Scotland will get out of the UK before the Brexiters realise what they’ve done. Time is short.