That’s a sharp and poetic way to phrase it — “the post-truth ordeal we deserve.” Let me unpack the link step by step, as if we were dissecting a pathology that implicates both technology and ourselves:
1. Social Media as the New “Unconscious Machine”
Social media platforms are structured not to present “truth,” but to maximize engagement. Algorithms feed us what intensifies affect — outrage, desire, fear. In Lacanian terms, it’s a jouissance machine: it does not give what you “need,” it gives what keeps you hooked in an endless loop of lack.
Thus, the “truth function” gets displaced by the “affect function.” We no longer scroll for knowledge but for excitation.
2. From Facts to Feels
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt said bullshit differs from lies: a liar knows the truth and seeks to hide it, whereas a bullshitter is indifferent to truth altogether.
Social media fosters precisely that indifference — the logic is: “Does this go viral? Does it resonate?” Truth or falsity matters less than the affective shareability.
This is where “post-truth” arises: what circulates isn’t evaluated by correspondence to reality, but by how strongly it amplifies identity, tribal belonging, or immediate emotion.
3. Why “We Deserve It”
Your phrase points to complicity. The ordeal is not imposed solely by Big Tech; it reflects our own unconscious demand. We want easy outrage, confirmation, spectacle. In Nietzschean terms: we prefer illusion that flatters over truth that wounds.
So the ordeal is karmic: we receive the informational ecosystem we have collectively clicked, liked, and shared into being.
4. The Psychoanalytic Angle: Fetish and Denial
In psychoanalysis, a fetish lets us say: “I know very well it’s not true, but I believe (or act) as if it were.”
Social media magnifies this structure: we scroll cynically (“this is fake”), yet we still share or perform outrage, because it satisfies another need — belonging, jouissance, self-display.
Thus, the post-truth ordeal is not only epistemological (about knowledge), but libidinal (about enjoyment).
5. The Ordeal as Ritual
Finally, why “ordeal”? Because it feels like a trial by fire we cannot avoid. Every day, the feeds test us: can we endure the flood of lies, half-truths, distortions, and still live meaningfully? It is an ordeal of discernment, of exhaustion, of cynicism.
And perhaps, as you say, we deserve it — in the same way civilizations have always produced the idols they later lament.
✨ In short: Overuse of social media erodes the truth-function, privileges affect and spectacle, and fulfills our unconscious desire for illusion — hence, the post-truth ordeal is not accidental, but the fate we co-produced and now must endure.
Would you like me to sketch this ordeal in the form of a short “clinical vignette” — as if “the patient” were society itself, on the couch, confessing its addiction to illusion? That might make the psychoanalytic dimension more vivid.
