Cultural Contexts of Moving Away from the Truth:Polish Examples and not On

• Main Author: Ryszard Radzik
• Format: Article
• Language: Ukrainian
• Published: V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University 2019-11-01
• Series: Український соціологічний журнал
• Online Access: https://periodicals.karazin.ua/usocjour/article/view/14666/13755

The article is devoted to the analysis of the causes of the emergence of posttruths, which were updated not only in the present, but also in the rather distant past. The article has a number of concepts that are close in meaning to the concept of “post-truth.” This thesis is important because it explains the reason for the existence of post-truth: the decline of the elite, layers of ethos, creating a higher culture and cultivating honor and truthfulness. Another reason is the secularization of public life, which separates the truth from the sphere of sacrum. Particular attention n is focused on the presentation of a Russian understanding of truth and truth. It is based on a philosophical tradition integrated into Orthodoxy. Note that moral subjectivity outside the law, characteristic of understanding the truth in the USSR and inherent in the communist morality of the Bolsheviks, led to mass crimes during the Stalinist period. It is proved that in Poland the elitist ethos that existed between the two world wars, significantly weakened after the Second World War and gradually “eroded” after 1989. During this period, factors of this ethos, such as Catholicism, historical identity, literature were weakened, and with them the national identity as a whole, which reduced the weight of elements based on dignity in public life, and, consequently, the truth as one of them. The attention is focused on the fact that in the modern world, as a result of a number of new political, economic and cultural phenomena, the truth has acquired a distinctly relativistic dimension, and the new reality has found ideological expression in the concept of postmodernity. The conclusions are formulated that today people get the feeling that they are living in a world of chaos: information, value and cultural. The consequence of this is a significant weakening of the categories of rational thinking, the culture of discussion, the intellectual dimension of higher culture, and the political and cultural fragmentation of society. The weakening of the level of subjectivity of individuals and social communications and the formation of fluid identities deepen the existing crisis, which finds expression, including in the phenomenon of post-truth.