Review: True Enough

Title: True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society

Author: Farhad Manjoo

Genre: Current Issues/Sociology

Trigger Warnings: Racial slurs (mentions), bigotry (mentions), death of children

Back Cover:

Why has punditry lately overtaken news? Why do lies seem to linger so long in the cultural subconscious even after they’ve been thoroughly discredited? And why, when more people than ever before are documenting the truth with laptops and digital cameras, does fact-free spin and propaganda seem to work so well? True Enough explores leading controversies of national politics, foreign affairs, science, and business, explaining how Americans have begun to organize themselves into echo chambers that harbor diametrically different facts—not merely opinions—from those of the larger culture.

Review:

I am really tired of these misleading titles (or subtitles, as the case may be) that promise something actionable but are really just about how and why things got this way (e.g. How to Do Nothing, anything by Malcolm Gladwell). This is not a book about “Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society,” it’s a book about how society got to the point where facts and reality are debatable.

It is a really fascinating piece of sociological work. How did we get to the point where scientists and experts nearly unanimously say that climate change is real and human-caused, but the public debate is not about what to do about it but whether these facts are actual facts? Farhad Manjoo explores ideological echo chambers, conspiracy theories, human psychology, and the perfect storm of modern society that puts even long-established facts like “the earth is round” up for debate.

It’s not at all a bad book. In fact, it is rather fascinating, and if you go in expecting to get a sociological study on why in the heck our society is like this, you’ll probably enjoy it immensely. I just went in expecting to learn how to live in a post-fact society, and that’s not at all what I got. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret the read and I learned a lot, but it was not what I expected.