The World of Ragle Gumm

Last week I went to see a recording of BBC Radio's satirical sketch show, Newsjack. Inevitably, two subjects dominated the skits and jokes: Brexit and Donald Trump. In many ways, it is a difficult time for writers of satirical sketches as reality is often weirder and more absurd than anything a script writer could devise, but on the other hand, there is material in bucket loads. Meanwhile, one of the twentieth century's greatest pieces of fiction - George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984 -has apparently seen an upsurge in sales, prompting many people to wheel out that old saying, "1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual."

  

It is true that certain aspects of politics seem to have taken an Orwellian turn in recent months, with both Brexit and Trump. The Orwellian sounding term 'Post truth' is not new (it was first coined as far back as 1992), but the EU referendum campaign - in particular the oft repeated and much debunked claim that EU membership cost the UK £350million per week - brought the expression into common usage. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Michael Deacon said that in the culture of post truth, "Facts are negative. Facts are pessimistic. Facts are unpatriotic." Facts which do not fit with the preconceptions of a particular group or individual are, therefore deemed unreliable: somewhere there are better facts, facts that more readily support that group or person's position. It also strikes me that proponents of certain post-truth ideas are like many conspiracy theorists; the more vociferously their theories are denied and debunked, the more they believe them to be validated. Denial equals proof.

No matter how often the message on the bus was debunked, and even after Nigel Farage admitted it was a "mistake," this post-truth 'fact' was still oft quoted.

The media has often been accused of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story, but what exactly are facts? Years ago I worked for a manager who would refer to "true facts," which I always thought (but never said), was tautological: by definition, a fact must be true. A fact is a thing that is known, or proved, to be true, so what type of fact could there be, apart from a true one? Today that definition of a fact is under attack: opinions and downright falsehoods are being dressed up in fancy clothes and sent out into the world to masquerade as facts, and as Lenin said, "A lie told often enough becomes the truth." With the amount of news that we can access today - through television, radio, newspapers and the internet - a statement, regardless of its provenance, regardless of its accuracy, becomes a fact through repetition and through it being published through a multiplicity of sources. Fact checking using just the internet is unreliable: a wildly implausible statement cannot be treated as verified simply because two or three different outlets report it, but with our voracious appetite for 'news' and with the media's equally insatiable desire to be the first with a story, our critical faculties need to be heightened. Under the constant bombardment of post-truth stories, alternative facts and fake news, sifting the wheat from the chaff is more difficult than at any time in history. Simply put, we need to be less credulous and more sceptical.

If Orwell were writing 1984 today, he would probably quietly tear up his manuscript and never think of it again. He would undoubtedly concede that no work of fiction could compete with the absurdity, the contradictions and the downright cruelty of the world we now live in. Equally, he would be horrified that the ideas that he set out in his work have been treated less as warnings and more as guidelines. We now live in a world where, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, doublethink, hate crime, and doublespeak - to name but three of the concepts from 1984 - have become part of our normal life. The last of these is particularly prevalent  (just think of downsizing when used as a euphemism for redundancy) while doublethink is so ingrained in politicians and many of their supporters that most will not even recognise that they are guilty of it.

The twin concepts of post-truth and alternative facts have led us into a world where the President of the United States of America squabbles with an actress over social media because she had the temerity to criticise him in a speech at an award ceremony, and berates the press for publishing what he calls fake news simply because their reportage is uncomplimentary, while blithely making unverifiable statements about voter fraud and the size of his inauguration crowd.  If The Donald is that thin skinned, it bodes ill for the day he is attacked by a political heavyweight, or the day when one of his controversial policies fails. If it were not so serious it would be funny.

It remains to be seen whether a wall is ever built along the border with Mexico - and Trump does seem to have diluted his guarantee that Mexico would pay for such a wall to a suggestion that he will claw the money back somehow once it is built - and equally his executive order that halted the entire US refugee programme, indefinitely banned Syrian refugees, and suspended all nationals from seven countries may turn out to be short lived in light of legal opposition following a case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). But if we criticise Trump for his actions, we must at least concede that unlike many politicians, he is already making good on many of his campaign promises - no matter how objectionable many people think they are.

Just as Orwell's seminal work becomes more prophetic with each passing day, I cannot help but feel that we may be in a world that bears more than a passing resemblance to the sort of alternative realities that Philip K Dick created. Worlds like the one inhabited by Ragle Gumm in Time Out Of Joint, where the reality Gumm believes he exists in begins slowly to unravel and expose the real world outside. One can almost believe that one day soon we will pick up a discarded newspaper that was not supposed to be found, and find an obituary of John F Kennedy, who we will discover was not assassinated in 1963, but lived to be one-hundred years of age and died peacefully in a Florida nursing home. And from that discovery, our world will suddenly start to morph into one in which Donald Trump is a professional golfer with no political ambitions, the European Union never came into being and Nigel Farage is still trading commodities on the London Metal Exchange.

Philip K Dick

The late US senator Daniel Moynihan said - presciently, in 1994 - "Everyone is entitled to his opinion, but not his own facts," and a great deal of what are being presented as facts on all sides (where they are not downright falsehoods) are largely just opinion and speculation. Despite the opprobrium in which Trump is held and the intense opposition there has been to Brexit, time will judge Trump's Presidency and Britain's exit from the EU and may even do so more swiftly than any of us expect. Maybe, in years to come we will look back at Brexit and the election of Donald Trump more positively than we can currently imagine - personally I doubt it, but I could be wrong - but whatever history makes of this period, the time is ripe for 'true facts' to make a comeback.