Having an opinion doesn’t mean believing. The question as to why we always need a why is easy to answer if we settle for it. The truth—too démodé, peremptory and unsuited to the stifling heat and biting cold of our age—is elusive, indignant and made murky by the mechanisms of politics and media that shrink and pervert it even for the minds that seek to overthrow it. Truth is one thing, fiction is another. History is one thing, reconstruction is another. Who owns the truth, who is its guarantor? What is real and what we cannot understand has been investigated since the dawn of time. It inspired the well-known novel by the father of modern French science fiction, René Barjavel, with his rediscovered civilisation 900 metres beneath the ice, tells the most dystopian and utopian story of historical pessimism and faith in human potential. Truth belongs to those who shout the loudest, just as existence, reality and the attestation of life belong to the most capable. Ideology trumps reality, reason trumps truth. Regarding that which transcends reality, Schopenhauer said: You either think or you believe. Do we really need truth in the age of artificial intelligence? Is challenging ChatGPT during a conversation relevant to the new reality we live in? Do you ever question a response from Siri or Alexa? We believe in technology that makes us better, in the wisdom of the masses and in a stupidity that suits us. The lack of relevance is only the beginning of a search that frightens us and we cannot understand whether what we are watching and experiencing is true or just the latest fiction.
