Postfaktisch

German linguists basically admitted defeat in 2016. They picked postfaktisch—post-factual, post-truth—as their Word of the Year. Oxford had done the same in English. When the language establishment starts coining words for how broken things have become, you know something’s really shifted.

The Society for German Language explained it pretty baldly in their official statement: in political discourse, emotions had started to matter more than facts. People were willing to ignore evidence, to accept lies, because those lies felt right. Felt true. That feeling was enough. The other top contenders—”Brexit,” Trump-Effekt, references to fake news—they all pointed at the same thing. The conversation had stopped being about what happened and started being about what you wanted to believe happened instead.

I remember when lies at least had to try. They needed argument, evidence, internal consistency. Being dishonest took effort. Now a lie just had to feel right. It had to tell you what you already wanted to hear. That was all that mattered.

What struck me was the openness of it. Not that people had been dishonest before—they always are—but that we got comfortable with it happening right there on the surface, no pretense. The bullshit was visible and we just lived with it. Somehow that feels worse than the lie.

Once you name the thing, you can’t pretend it isn’t happening. Not that naming it changes anything, but at least you’re not pretending anymore. That’s what postfaktisch does. It marks the moment we admitted what had already happened.