The Post-Truth Era

I had been looking for a route in to talk about what I think is the most significant communication challenge of our time. I didn’t have a way in. And if I’m going to write about something, it has to be fun. Then Jordan Peterson came to town, and suddenly, I had my narrative. 

Imagine, a small gathering at our house on a Friday night. It was late - the time when mischief makers come out to play. So, for fun, I threw it out there: 'Jordan Peterson is doing a talk on Tuesday.' One of the other Dads, a fellow agent of chaos, picked up exactly what I was putting down and played along. ‘We should go’, he said. 😉 Playing for reactions is risky these days. This one was more than we bargained for. Intense, absurd, and, for me, lingering most of the weekend.

Now, I’m pretty indifferent to Peterson, as I have become to most of the folks in the ‘Rogan-sphere’. Too much click bait for a Geriatric Millennial who really just wants his sports news and the occasional bit of business insight from his online meandering. But that’s not the point. My point is how merely suggesting engagement (just listening) set off alarm bells.

How did we get here? How did we reach a point where even acknowledging a viewpoint outside our own ideological bubble feels like a betrayal?

COVID Changed How We Disagree

When we moved to Canada, I joined an online men’s group. It was everything you’d expect during COVID - isolated people looking for connection, trying to make sense of a world in flux.

One thing that sticks with me from that time is a podcast episode from the group creator about how the pandemic destroyed our ability to communicate. And this, dear reader, is the crux of my larger point.

Before the pandemic, debates at dinner parties were fun. Disagreements were part of the experience. “Agree to disagree” was the failsafe that kept friendships intact and allowed us to share who we were.

But COVID changed that. The topics weren’t abstract anymore. They were personal: Masks. Vaccines. Social distancing. Who’s in your bubble? Who isn’t?

These weren’t just opinions - they had real (and sometimes severe) consequences. And because of that, we didn’t just disagree; we severed ties. Friendships ended. Families stopped speaking. Lines were drawn, and once drawn, they became permanent.

I’m not in the group anymore. Not because it was bad, but because, at some point, talking in circles felt endless. Everyone was searching for validation rather than solutions. Validation isn’t the same as growth. At some point, the group stopped being about discussion and became a place to vent. I needed more than that.

We may have gone ‘back to the office’, but we never went ‘back to normal’. Instead, we entered an era where personal truth replaced shared reality.

Welcome to the Post-Truth Era

When I was younger, I dated a history PhD student. Back then, I thought history was about memorizing dates (like what happened in 1066) or coming up with mnemonics to remember which queen lost her head first. But I quickly learned that wasn’t the case - sorry, not sorry (if you know, you know).

History is far more complex. It’s arguably a search for truth, filtered through various perspectives and retellings. This idea of truth stuck with me and influenced my path through the world. Now, I find myself in an age of “wokeness” and a culture that increasingly revolves around your truth, their truth, my truth, and, sometimes, no truth at all. Welcome to the post-truth era.

We’re into eras at the moment. Thanks for nothing, Taylor. We live in a time when information is more accessible than ever before. But more information doesn’t mean better information. Instead, it means we can cherry-pick the facts and opinions that validate whatever beliefs we already hold.

Post-truth doesn’t mean we’re all lying to each other - it’s more nuanced than that. It means that subjective emotions and personal experiences have begun to outweigh objective facts in decision-making. For marketers, communicators, and brand leaders, this presents a fundamental problem: The audience no longer seeks out evidence to challenge their assumptions. Instead, they look for validation, and when they find it, even if it’s based on a false premise, they hold onto it.

And social media? It doesn’t just reflect this - it amplifies it.

One of my favorite people sent me a passage from The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher (which is a book, printed by a real publisher and fact checked). I’ll paraphrase the gist below, you can go read the book yourself:

“The amount of social media content competing for your attention doubles every year. If your network produces 200 posts a day and you have time to read 100, algorithms show you the most outraged half. Next year, when 200 doubles to 400, you see the most outraged quarter. The year after that, the most outraged eighth. Over time, your impression of your own community becomes more moralizing, aggrandizing, and outraged - and so do you.”

In short: The more noise, the more radical the content that breaks through. Nuance doesn’t get engagement. Complexity doesn’t drive clicks. But outrage? Outrage and intolerance is viral.

The Illusion of Choice

The real problem? We don’t even realize we’re being played. We think we’re making independent choices, but we’re just reacting. Outrage is engineered, and we keep taking the bait.

Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy, once said:

“Our conscious mind tries hard to preserve the illusion that it deliberately chose every action you have ever taken; in reality, it was a bystander at best, and much of the time it didn’t even notice the decision being made.”

Human behavior is driven by emotions and identity. Studies in behavioral science reveal that we often act on impulse and emotion before rationalizing our decisions afterward. This is the real challenge of the post-truth era: our opinions feel like choices, but they’re just reactions.

This is the task for professional communicators today, navigating a world where audiences prioritize emotional truth over objective reality. The result? A culture where people align themselves with an identity, then defend it at all costs. Truth becomes secondary.

This crisis of communication isn’t just personal. It’s playing out at every level, including in business. As someone who works in branding and corporate messaging, I see it firsthand: companies are struggling to reach audiences in a world where facts don’t persuade, but emotions do.

Identity is the stories we tell ourselves, and culture is the stories we tell each other. People don’t just want information; they want validation that a brand aligns with their worldview.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The post-truth era may seem chaotic, but it’s also an opportunity. The brands that thrive will be the ones that understand emotional truth (not just objective truth) the ones that embed facts within compelling, authentic narratives that resonate with their audience’s values.

But here’s where most brands get it wrong: authenticity isn’t just a marketing play. It’s not about checking diversity boxes or adopting the right buzzwords. It’s about ensuring that the right voices are shaping the stories being told. Because in a time when trust is fragile, people can sense when a brand is posturing.

Consistency is everything. A company’s internal culture must reflect its external messaging. If employees don’t believe the company’s values, neither will customers. The goal isn’t just to sell a product or service, it’s to be a brand that embodies the emotional reality of the audience. The brands that get this right will earn loyalty. The ones that don’t? They’ll fade into the noise.

The Death of Curiosity

I hope my kids grow up with the ability to think critically, to be curious about why people don’t think exactly as they do. That’s why we have them in Waldorf education - a pedagogy that famously limits screen time but, more importantly, teaches discernment. The goal isn’t just to keep kids off social media. The goal is to equip them with the ability to challenge what they see.

Because here’s what worries me most: We are raising a generation that is losing the ability to be curious.

I'm writing a white paper about this, or an op-ed. If you’ve read my work, it’s probably more of an op-ed. And in a post-truth world, ironically it doesn’t have to be anything but that.

When information is limitless but nuance is scarce, the greatest casualty of our ideological battles is curiosity. We’ve reached a point where acknowledging complexity is seen as a betrayal of your side, and where the demand for absolute adherence to a narrative outweighs the pursuit of actual understanding. 

This isn’t progress. It’s performance.

The very essence of progress (built on questioning, learning, and adapting) has been replaced by rigid beliefs, enforced by social pressure and moral superiority, instead of reason.

This isn’t about rejecting progressive ideals or embracing backlash. It’s about true intellectual integrity: the ability to hold multiple perspectives at once and to understand why someone might see the world differently without immediately branding them as an enemy.

The absurdity is not just in the extreme positions themselves but in the refusal to acknowledge that other viewpoints exist for a reason. Dismissing all disagreement as bigotry or ignorance is not a moral high ground; it is an intellectual dead end. If we are so convinced of our own righteousness that we can no longer afford to be curious about opposing views, then we are not seeking truth. We are merely fighting for dominance.

A truly progressive society does not fear debate. It does not shun inconvenient questions. It does not insist that reality be bent to fit an ideological framework. If we wish to move beyond the post-truth era, we must first reclaim the courage to engage with ideas that make us uncomfortable, not to agree with them, but to understand why they exist.

Without that, we are not building a better future. We are merely silencing dissent until the pendulum swings again.

And it will swing again. It always does.

So go see Jordan if he comes to town. Or go see anyone you completely disagree with. Just don’t let the fear of being wrong stop you from thinking.

As you were.
MrMcK.

About the Author: Mark McKenna helps companies all over the world drive progress through strategic storytelling and content production. He has spent nearly 20 years at creative agencies serving clients at the intersection of corporate communications, advertising, and public relations. For the last decade, he has held senior leadership roles, providing counsel to the decision makers at the largest organizations in the world. Mark’s career includes time spent in London and New York, working with Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 clients on their communication challenges across EMEA and the Americas.

But, if you meet him in person, he’ll say “Hi my name is Mark McKenna. I help businesses tell their most important stories in a way that makes people want to listen.”