When Facts Stop Mattering

When Facts Stop Mattering James B. Greenberg 12-31-2026

The other day I shared a post on Facebook about Hannah Arendt without realizing it had been written by AI. When readers pointed this out, I took it down. Arendt’s work is too important—and too often misused—to let sloppiness pass. To remedy that, I want to look more closely at what she actually argued, and what it helps us see about the present moment, without turning her into a prophet or making her a mirror of our present fears.

Arendt is often quoted as if she were warning that lies would eventually win. That formulation sounds plausible, but it misses her deeper concern. She knew that politics has always involved deception. What worried her was something more basic: a situation in which facts themselves lose their authority, where people stop expecting truth to be stable, shared, or even knowable.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt described a condition in which the line between fact and fiction breaks down, not because people are persuaded to believe falsehoods, but because they stop believing that truth can be known at all. Conflicting claims exist side by side without consequence. Experience no longer corrects belief. Assertions circulate without needing to correspond to reality. Under those conditions, domination does not depend on conviction. It depends on disorientation.

Arendt helps us see why the most consequential political move is often not the lie itself, but the attack on the institutions that would ordinarily correct it. When courts are portrayed as enemies, when professional expertise is treated as bias, when records and oversight are dismissed as obstruction, factual reality loses its standing. What follows is not persuasion, but compliance within a system where truth no longer has the authority to interrupt power.

This is what Arendt meant when she wrote that the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the committed ideologue, but the person for whom the distinction between true and false no longer exists. Read carefully, her argument is not about fanaticism. It is about the collapse of judgment itself. The danger Arendt identified was not belief taken too far, but judgment rendered impossible.

She returned to this problem years later in her essay “Truth and Politics.” In this piece she made a distinction that remains essential. Opinions belong to political debate. They are meant to be contested. Factual truths do not. They refer to events that have already occurred and cannot be argued away without dissolving the ground on which political life rests. When factual truth is reduced to just another opinion, political disagreement does not become more democratic. It becomes untethered.

What disappears in such moments is what Arendt called a “common world”: a shared reality that allows people to disagree about meaning and values while still recognizing the same events, the same evidence, the same past. This common world is not an abstraction. It has to be built and maintained. Courts, archives, journalism, science, and routine administrative procedures do not merely convey facts. They help produce the conditions under which facts can matter.

Seen this way, the loss of a common world is not primarily a moral failure or a cognitive one. It is a structural condition. This is where Arendt’s analysis helps make sense of the present moment.

There is another parallel worth naming because it helps explain why Arendt’s argument resonates so strongly today. In the late twentieth century, postmodernism challenged the stability of truth claims, the neutrality of facts, and the authority of claims to objectivity. Much of this critique was valuable. It exposed the power relations embedded in knowledge production and unsettled complacent assumptions about neutrality.

Arendt would not have objected to critique as such. She distrusted any ideology that claimed to possess absolute or final truth. Her concern lay elsewhere. She worried about what happens when skepticism toward authority slides into skepticism toward reality itself, when the idea that factual truth exists begins to weaken without being replaced by durable political and institutional practices capable of sustaining a shared world.

In its scholarly forms, postmodern critique did not deny the existence of events or facts. But as its sensibilities diffused into broader culture, skepticism toward truth often flattened into a more generalized suspicion. Facts became perspectives. Verification came to look optional. Contradiction lost its power to unsettle. What began as critique hardened into a kind of epistemic exhaustion. That exhaustion did not remain confined to academic debate. It entered public life.

Arendt helps clarify why this matters politically. Her fear was not that people would believe competing truths, but that they would cease to expect truth to function at all. In such conditions, power does not need to persuade. It only needs to manage confusion. The erosion of factual authority becomes a resource rather than a problem.

This epistemic weakening has been intensified by contemporary media systems. Information environments organized around speed, volume, and attention reward repetition over verification and coherence over correspondence with reality. Visibility becomes a proxy for truth. Contradiction no longer destabilizes claims; it becomes ambient noise. These systems do not require a population committed to falsehood. They require only that evaluation be costly and attention scarce.

Under such conditions, truth does not disappear. It becomes expensive. Verification takes time. Context requires effort. Correction travels more slowly than assertion. Factual reality loses its capacity to organize judgment not because it has been disproven, but because the conditions that once allowed it to function have been degraded.

A second dimension of the present moment lies in political economy. Arendt assumed the existence of institutions capable of sustaining a common world. Those institutions did not erode by accident. Over several decades, market-driven reforms hollowed out public capacities that once stabilized factual authority. Journalism was marketized. Regulatory agencies were defunded. Scientific research became increasingly dependent on private funding. Archival and administrative functions were treated as costs rather than public goods.

From an anthropological perspective, this matters because truth is not self-sustaining. It requires material support. When the institutions responsible for verification, record-keeping, and accountability are weakened, factual reality loses its infrastructure. What remains is a fragmented informational landscape in which claims circulate freely, but judgment has no stable footing.

Anthropology helps make this visible. Common sense is not innate. It is produced and reproduced through social practices. Trust is not simply a sentiment; it is an institutional relationship. Facts do not compel agreement on their own. They rely on culturally legitimate procedures for being established, challenged, and remembered. When those procedures lose credibility or capacity, the distinction between fact and opinion erodes not because people reject truth, but because the social labor that sustains it has been withdrawn.

Late in her life, Arendt turned to the question of thinking itself. She did not present thinking as a solution or a virtue. Thinking, she insisted, produces no rules and guarantees no outcomes. Its political significance lay elsewhere. Thinking interrupts. It introduces hesitation into systems that depend on automatic acceptance and routinized response.

Arendt did not predict our moment. She did not write about digital platforms, marketized media, or contemporary disinformation campaigns. What she offered instead was a diagnosis of a condition in which factual reality loses its capacity to anchor judgment and people cease to expect truth to function as a shared reference point.

When facts stop mattering, freedom is rarely overthrown in a single act. It erodes as the conditions that make judgment possible are withdrawn. Politics continues, but untethered from reality. What remains is not belief, but compliance within a world that no longer feels fully real.

That is the insight Arendt leaves us with. Not a warning, not a prophecy, but a way of seeing when the ground beneath political life has begun to shift.