Tag: philosophy

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Post-truth democracies

ANTHONY BUTLER: Popular instinct rises against elite judgment in post-truth world

First published in Business Day

January 23, 2026

US President Donald Trump speaks during the 56th annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 21 2026. (Picture: DENIS BALIBOUSE/Reuters)

When Donald Trump addressed world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday it felt like the much-heralded “post-truth” world had truly arrived.

The US president strung together a litany of demonstrably false claims, such as that the US “gave Greenland back” to Denmark after World War 2 (it had never become US territory) and that there are no wind farms in China (it generates more wind energy than any other country).

But none of this is entirely new. As the historian Sophia Rosenfeld has observed, democracy has always been about who decides what is true. Representative democracy embodies the promise that citizens, drawing on their lived experience and common sense, can collectively judge what is right and good.

Governing complex societies requires specialised knowledge, such as a mastery of statistics, law and economics, which must be generated and interpreted by experts. Citizens bring values and practical insight to democracy; elites filter information, weigh evidence and transform competing ideas and claims into feasible policies. Democracy does not capitulate to expertise, but it cannot dispense with it either.

For much of the history of Western democracy popular participation grew while states created professional public services, universities trained experts and ostensibly objective methods for justifying policy, such as statistical analysis, acquired the appearance of neutrality.

This settlement always carried the seeds of its own destruction. Whenever knowledge becomes purely technical and self-referential the ability to participate in debate narrows and decisions are taken without popular engagement.

In populist counterreactions, citizens reject the monopolisation of truth by elites and reclaim a place for common sense and ordinary judgment. This can widen participation and break the spell of elite and expert complacency, but it can easily slide into contempt for knowledge, the treatment of evidence as manipulation and the castigation of experts and expertise.

The contemporary “post-truth” moment in the West is therefore not an unprecedented collapse of reason but rather the breakdown of a long-standing and unstable balance. Today’s struggle over what Rosenfeld calls “epistemic authority” — who decides what counts as fact — is worsened by social media’s circulation of information, stripped of context, while algorithms reward novelty, outrage and tribal loyalty.

All democracies, not just Western ones, are vulnerable to “epistemic breakdown”: distrust of institutions, populist suspicion of experts and competing truth claims. Even in the Thembu tribal meetings of Nelson Mandela’s youth, where “all men were to be heard and a decision was taken together as a people”, there was an elite side to the epistemic bargain. The regent would sum up what had been said and form a “consensus” among the diverse opinions. Democracy survives only if truth is filtered, stabilised and institutionalised.

Elites and experts have to accept that knowledge without legitimacy will cause a backlash. Citizens must recognise that popular common sense without evidence and expertise invites manipulation. Democracy fails when either becomes predominant; it survives only when a precarious balance between them is maintained.

The greatest challenge for all democracies — and perhaps especially for newer democracies in middle-income countries such as South Africa — is that the factors that disrupt the uneasy balance between elite judgment and popular instinct are not easy to control or change.

We can in principle regulate social media and contain the potential threats posed by fresh technological developments such as AI. But declining trust in institutions, resentment of elites and the circulation of conspiracies all feed on deeper social divisions, including economic inequality and exclusion from meaningful citizenship.

When material divides widen, institutions lose credibility and become deeply detached from expert knowledge. When citizens inhabit dramatically different material worlds, it becomes impossible to sustain a shared account of reality and expertise starts to look like privilege hiding behind a different name.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Undesirable leaders

ANTHONY BUTLER: No avoiding the glut of putrid political leaders

Does power attract twisted personalities, or does it turn decent people into monsters?

First published in Business Day

January 09, 2026

'Failed politicians never go away. At best they linger and whinge. At worst they re-invent themselves and return to power.'
Power-hungry individuals are certainly drawn to high office, craving status, recognition and control. (123RF/prazis )

As citizens embark on this year’s political journey, they must reckon with the disconcertingly wide array of unappealing political leaders worldwide.

According to contrarian political scientist Brian Klaas, three character traits are widespread among such leaders. The first is Machiavellianism, defined by scheming and interpersonal manipulation.

Machiavellians use deceit, fabrication and inflated credentials to secure positions of authority, and they treat colleagues as pawns rather than human beings.

A second trait is psychopathy — an inability to feel empathy — which is accompanied by impulsivity, recklessness and aggression. Psychopaths can ascend to political office by employing superficial charm: they do not react to the pain of others, but they can mimic empathy to manipulate those they intend to exploit.

Psychopaths’ brains are inactive in regions associated with moral decision-making, allowing them to view people as tools rather than as human beings, facilitating amoral choices, and reducing hesitation when committing monstrous acts.

The third trait, narcissism, is characterised by arrogance and grandiosity. Narcissists are disproportionately drawn to power because they possess an inflated sense of entitlement and seek constant fawning from subordinates. Because they are so confident, they fail to recognise their own incompetence until the system they lead suffers catastrophic failure.

Attracting the corruptible

Why are such traits so widespread among political leaders? Do positions of great power attract twisted personalities, or does political power turn decent people into monsters? As Klaas puts it, does power corrupt, or does it simply attract the corruptible?

Power-hungry individuals are certainly drawn to high office, craving status, recognition and control. They may be unusually effective at navigating party selection processes and political campaigns. Their superficial charm makes them appear likeable and competent, and they are willing to fabricate credentials or lie about their past. They project a sense of certainty easily mistaken for competence.

Humans are hardwired to favour leaders who project strength, masculinity and dominance, which were survival advantages on the prehistoric savanna but can be irrelevant or dangerous today. These archaic biases persist, leading to an irrational preference for physically imposing men — a shirtless Vladimir Putin comes to mind — during perceived security threats, which can be fabricated.

Power also changes incumbents, however humbly their careers may begin. Psychologist Dacher Keltner has shown that gaining power can shift one’s cognitive orientation from cautious to proactive and risk-oriented. Powerful individuals come to believe, wrongly, they can control outcomes, which results in flawed risk assessments and ultimately gambling with people’s lives.

Moreover, as people feel more powerful, they lose social inhibitions, eat impulsively, drive recklessly or engage in sexual affairs, because they no longer worry what others think of them.

Most important of all, even decent political leaders face “dirty hands” problems — moral dilemmas in which they must commit unprincipled acts to achieve a greater moral good.

Machiavellians and narcissists can do wrong easily, untroubled by conscience, but the dilemma has also confronted moral leaders throughout history.

Winston Churchill allowed the HMAS Sydney to be sunk by Nazi forces to protect the secret that the Enigma codes had been cracked, sacrificing lives that could have been saved to help win the wider war.

Abraham Lincoln used bribery to secure the passage of the 13th Amendment, acting dishonestly to end the greater evil of slavery.

Less grandly, and more ubiquitously, politicians everywhere make trades with nefarious funders whose backing is required to win elections. In middle-income countries such as SA, such disturbing moral calculations are routine.

Ultimately, the public expects politicians to be principled, but leaders must perform unprincipled acts to survive and, perhaps, to preserve society.

What appears to be a corrosion of character is frequently just the weight of governing in an inherently immoral situation.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.