Conspiracy Theories, Brexit, and the Nature of the Present Crisis

In this paper, I will examine several instances of so-called ‘post-truth’ politics in the debates over the Brexit referendum in 2016. Many observers of these debates noted that factual claims were less important than emotional appeals, and they concluded that truth itself had become irrelevant. This interpretation of the crisis led many to blame constructivist and postmodern theories of knowledge. These theories had relativized truth and they had, it was alleged, enabled post-truth politics. As philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett said in an interview with The Guardian, “what the postmodernists did was truly evil”. Yet this conclusion is rooted in a confusion. I want to show in my paper that so-called ‘post-truth politics’ consists in a specific form of relativism caused by the pervasive use of conspiracy theories. Yet postmodernism is clearly something else than conspiracy theorizing. Insight into the social construction of certain truth claims is something else than belief in the existence of a group of mischievous conspirators. An acknowledgment of this difference can lead us to a quite different interpretation of the causes of the success of the Leave campaign, and indeed of the nature of the present crisis in Europe.