The world is deeply polarized at present. Whatever issue one takes, from climate change, to migration, to inequality, it seems that people are increasingly unwilling to reach across the divide and understand the world from the other’s perspective. A number of pundits tell us that these are the problems of a post-truth era (McIntyre 2018). People are not simply interpreting the facts differently but are dealing with ‘alternative facts’. If we could only get back to truth, we could begin to clean up the mess we are in.

Rather than truth versus untruth, I would suggest that we are living in a time characterized by the battle between two alternative understandings of truth: rational truth and confessional truth. Rational truth comes from logical arguments and scientific studies. Confessional truth comes from within. It’s the truth of being ‘true to yourself’. Whereas some might equate rational truth with liberalism and confessional truth with illiberal populism, in Chapter 2 I argued that both understandings of truth are central to liberal political culture. And I explained that far from resolving our problems, when stressed to the exclusion of all else, these ideas of truth may well end up further fanning flames of division, standing in the way of those trying to build coalitions big enough to make change happen. Let me briefly expand on the problems with each understanding of truth in turn.

Rational truth is of fundamental importance in demonstrating the source and extent of the problems we face. But apparently it can’t convince us to act on those problems. Thirty years of hammering home the data about climate change and biodiversity loss has not facilitated change on the scale required (Latour 2017, 45– 6). Even if scarcity seems sufficient to get work on renewables going, the notion of keeping fossil fuels in the ground remains intuitively implausible. Governments understand that climate change and inequality will lead to social breakdown but investing in closing the borders and policing protest seem like cheaper fixes. Meanwhile, as already stressed in Chapter 1, rationality failed to stop Trump, Brexit, Modi or Erdoğan. Contrary to what many might like to believe in a post-Trump era, the truth is unlikely to save us (but see Friedman 2020).