ESSAY
Opinions Are Not Facts
We live among braindead megaphones
These days, truth has been diluted, subdued, balls-kneed, wrestled to the ground, and splintered by opinions, opinions, and more opinions.
As a species, we have definitely devolved over the last twenty years. And not a little. We now have “fake news” when the actual news refuses to flatter or back our declared and broadcast opinion. We now have “alternative facts” when real (as in true) facts refuse to cooperate. We now have opinions masquerading as facts.
True, opinions have been masquerading as facts for some time. As Montaigne (1533–1592) put it nearly 500 years ago: “Opinions are not certainties. Most human ‘certainties’ are in fact opinions.”
He also said: “We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make it our own.”
While today’s chaotic social media seems to be the primary source of news and certainties, just as in war, truth is the first casualty.
And so I wonder, are there any standing-on-its-own-two-feet truths left out there in what was once lovingly (and with so much hope) referred to as the World Wide Web (capitalized, no less), or did it scatter and disperse (and evaporate) along with the burst of the dot com…
