August 2025
In the introduction to her book, The Death of Truth, Michiko Kakatuni quoted from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (I.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist”. While those, who now declare most of the news of the Western world to be “fake”, are, for the most part, unable to say what is “real”, blinded are they by the bubble of disinformation and conspiratorial thought that is so rife today, perhaps the rest of us need to re-examine the distinction we automatically make between fact and fiction and ask ourselves whether it is a duality we might well begin to examine.