The Year We Agreed to Stop Agreeing on Facts

The runner-up list tells the whole story. Germany’s Society for the German Language chose "postfaktisch"—post-truth—as their word of 2016, the same year Oxford Dictionaries made the same call in English. The words that didn’t quite make the top spot: Brexit, Silvesternacht, Schmähkritik, Trump-Effekt, Social Bots, schlechtes Blut, Gruselclown, Burkiniverbot, and "Oh, wie schön ist Panama." That’s not a list of words. That’s a diagnosis.

The official jury statement read: "The artificial word postfaktisch points to the fact that political and social discourse today is increasingly about emotions rather than facts. Ever-larger segments of the population, in their resentment of ’those up there,’ are prepared to ignore facts and even willingly accept obvious lies." In the post-truth era, the statement continued, it’s not the claim to truth but the utterance of "felt truth" that leads to success.

What strikes me is the word "willingly." Not deceived. Not misled. Willing. There’s something almost respectful about that formulation—an acknowledgment that we’re not dealing with simple stupidity but with a deliberate transaction: I know this might not be true, and I don’t care, because the feeling it gives me is worth more than the accuracy. That’s a hard thing to argue against with facts, which is exactly the point.

2016 was the year this became impossible to pretend wasn’t happening. Emotions always mattered in politics—anyone who believes otherwise has never watched a stump speech—but there used to be a nominal obligation to at least gesture at facts, to frame the lie as a misunderstood truth. That fig leaf is gone now. What we’re left with is the thing itself, and a new word to describe it, which is either the beginning of understanding it or just the beginning of getting comfortable with it.