The Future of Truth

[...] He had put up one of his actors because he felt sure that in front of the cameras a genuine customer would have played down his loneliness to keep face, he would have told lies, and at best maybe said half the truth. Only one of his actors, who had done the job of cheering up a lonely person hundreds of times, would permit deep insights. He knew that his conman, the liar who knew what he was talking about, would speak the truth.

We have grown up with radio and photography. We need to do the same thing now with the internet. It is where we derive a large part of our information, from apps that we download to our mobile phones. All this is brand new. When I was editing one of my films in LA, the girlfriend of the editor would bring us coffee and croissants every morning, and then one day she couldn’t find us because her GPS system had broken down. The route wasn’t even difficult: five sets of lights dead straight, then left, then the next right. But she had never bothered to take in the buildings, the businesses, the shape of the streets, so she was promptly at sea.

How much are we willing to delegate? How much of our autonomy are we prepared to renounce? My questions come down to this: Are we really willing to give up thinking, give up dreaming? How will we defend ourselves? Are we even capable of doing so anymore? Just as we could in the pre-internet world, we have the opportunity – much faster now, of course, with the internet and no need to go to a library – to consult a multiplicity of sources. [...] Instead of spending our lives in an echo chamber of our own preferences and prejudices, it’s a good thing to listen to others from time to time. One should treat the internet with the same caution as other media, no exceptions. That should be our immediate response. As has been the way in criminal justice from the days of ancient Rome, our presumption should be: innocent until proven guilty. That is one of the great attainments of our civilization. But where the internet is concerned, we should perhaps follow the opposite policy: assume guilt, be suspicious, expect manipulation, propaganda, lies.

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A lot is also to do with education. Teachers are not sufficiently praised or rewarded in our society, even though teaching is one of the noblest and most important of callings. More needs to be done, but we can’t just appeal to the government. It would take too long to do too little. We have to do a good part of it by ourselves, which is a good and liberating thing. Read more. A three- or four-sentence tweet can’t possibly do justice to a complicated reality. Only books – of course treated with the same level of caution – can give us the understanding of deeper processes, of conceptual lines and trends in our reality. Of course, no one listens when you say it: Read. But that’s not just to do with the internet and short text messages and debates on social media. People have been turning away from books for decades, and today, even in classes on ancient Greek literature, you find that hardly any of those present reads, and only a minority can frame a simple thought in a couple of sentences. And that’s not just confined to out-of-the-way subjects like the classics. When young directors come to me, I tell them: Read, read, read, read, read. If you don’t read, you’ll presumably make films anyway, but they’ll be mediocre at best. If you don’t read, you’ll never make anything great.

Truth has no future, but truth has no past either.

But we will not, must not, cannot, give up the search for it.