When Truth Stops Being Trusted: The Flat Earth and the Fragility of Fact

As much as we would try to resist, truth has never stood outside of culture, language or interpretation. It has always shifted with us, not despite us. What we once stoned we now celebrate. What we once swore by, we now discard. Truth, in this sense, has always been socially constructed.

Science too, though it claims empirical clarity, is a frame of understanding rather than a neutral ground. An historically situated practice, born from a specific cultural moment that chose to isolate variables, reduce systems, and model certainty. It is a method, not a metaphysical ground. When we call science “truth,” we often forget it is still an interpretive structure.

Truth rarely lives alone. Even empirical truths can be made socially fragile. Not because the facts changed. But because beliefs gathered enough momentum to distort the frame in which facts are held.

We speak of truth as if it were a destination. As if one could simply arrive at it, point to it, and say, there it is. But truth, as we use the word, is not what it seems.

We say we seek it. But we mostly seek coherence. We mostly seek comfort. And often, we accept whatever truth makes the world livable, for us.

Truth feels like something absolute, but it only becomes functionally true when society allows it to be.

I. Truth and Permission

There is a difference between what is true and what is allowed to be true. Gravity, for instance, existed long before it was named. It pulled apples to the ground in Babylon as reliably as it does today, and yet for most of human history, no one spoke of it. It was not encoded in law or scripture or ritual. Yet, it still was.

Likewise, the Earth has always been round, but that roundness was not functionally true until people could see it, agree on it, teach it, and defend it. And even now, in a time when the evidence is overwhelming. That truth can still be undone socially. Not in physics. Not in space. But in the minds of those who chose to see “truth” differently.

Because truth, even at its most empirical, is never just a matter of fact. It is a matter of permission. It becomes what it is only when enough people build the scaffolding.

This is not a weakness of truth. It is a weakness of ours. Of language. Of memory. Of the things by which we decide what matters. Even science itself is shaped by funding, bias, repetition, peer review, language, and time. It discovers slowly. It self-corrects, eventually. But it does not speak from nowhere. It speaks from us.

And so the great tension emerges: there are truths that precede us, that would remain whether we lived or not, and there are truths that only exist because we hold them together, repeat them, inscribe them, enforce them.

The first is what is. The second is what is allowed to be.

The Earth remains round, the virus still spreads, the body still falls toward the ground. But for a time, none of that matters because the words we speak about those things, the tone we speak them in, and the number of voices speaking them become more powerful than the facts. It doesn’t take force. It takes enough people choosing to say otherwise.

We think of lies as fragile, but they’re not. Not when they’re spoken in chorus. Not when they carry moral weight, or comfort, or identity. A lie, repeated with enough intensity, becomes a kind of truth.

II. The Social Horizon of Truth

When we say “truth” we assume that it is fixed, but often we are stating something decided upon, something declared. Laws are written, policies drafted, systems constructed that define what counts as truth. The words shift and how we understand, govern and live-life in the world follows. What we call “truth” in public is often nothing more than the momentary agreement of a society that has convinced itself it cannot bear to be wrong.

Truth is not a compass point. We think of it as if it exists in a single place, waiting to be discovered and respected, but it does not sit outside of emotion. Truth wraps itself around the mood of an epoch, the decisions of the people, and the need for a movement. What we point to when we call something “truth” is often not a mountain, but the shadow it casts when the sun of emotion moves.

Societies do not align their truths with what is proved. They align them with what is tolerable. And when too many people begin to feel that the prevailing truth no longer fits, they create a new centre of gravity. And then call it truth.

Once there was one shared horizon, something we were seeking together, but now there are many. Technology has unbundled truth. Made it possible to live inside different emotional climates, different linguistic architectures, different frames of reality, without ever leaving your room. So we find ourselves in societies that sit side by side, speak across the same wires, but direct themselves by different stars.

III. Philosophers of Fragile Truth

Michel Foucault never asked what truth is, he asked who gets to decide. For him, truth was a spotlight, aimed from a platform built by institutions, language, and need. Every society produces its own “regime of truth.”^[1] A set of conditions: what counts as true, who is permitted to speak it, and what forms of evidence are acceptable. Truth is not something we stumble across, but something authorised and guarded but norms: bureaucracies, schools, journals, or media.

“Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth.” ^[2]

Truth, in this light, is not fixed, it’s a function. It performs a role inside a system that agrees to name it as true. What is heresy in one era becomes medicine in the next. What is criminal in one country is marriage in another. The facts may remain, but their meaning shifts when the frame is redrawn. Foucault insists we stop pretending that truth emerges in purity. It arrives through selection, through ritual, through permission. With this understanding it becomes harder to claim the comfort of certainty.

Hannah Arendt wrote of truth’s fragility. For Hannah, factual truth was never secure on its own, it depends on memory, attention and moral responsibility. It could be ignored, rewritten or forgotten. In her reflection on totalitarianism, she distinguished between rational truth (the kind philosophy seeks) and factual truth (the kind history records), and warned that both were vulnerable to erosion.

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.”^[3]

Saturation may be the erosion Arendt feared. A hundred competing versions, a thousand distractions, and slowly we slide into indifference. When every version of reality is available, none of them is true. And this kind of uncertainty happens when politics is performance, information becomes noise, and language is incendiary, rather than cause for reflection. Arendt saw this most clearly in propaganda, the relentless, overwhelming coherence replaced inquiry with identity. Making questions feel dangerous, and agreement feel like a virtue.

William James said a truth is not abstract or absolute, it is something that is made true, slowly, through action, testing and endurance. There are no illusions of perfect truth in his philosophy of pragmatism, he was not interested in if something is eternally true, but whether it proves itself true in the living of it. There was no measuring stick of a divine blueprint, but something that holds up, again and again, in the face of lived uncertainty. That is a truth worth keeping. But only for so long as it works, once it stops working it is just something we used to believe.

“Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.”^[4]

This was not to rescue truth from uncertainty, but a way to welcome it. He accepts that our beliefs shift as our needs shift, that our systems adapt, and our truths must be lived through time, rather than stand outside of it. The truths we hold onto today my fall away tomorrow, for no other reason that the no longer hold in the life we are trying to live. There is not much comfort in James’ view, but there is an honesty, a way to speak of truth that doesn’t pretend to be unshakeable, but one that is worth building upon.

IV. When Truth Becomes a Weapon

How we use the word truth is where our influence really shines. We speak of truth to win arguments, claim ground or demand allegiance. The word “truth” is a signal, a form of permission, a way to say “this is serious and must be accepted,” and when used in this way it becomes a lever.

The word carries so much force that it has been weaponised: in headlines, in movements, in courts, pulpits, and algorithms. It lends a moral weight to opinion, urgency to speculation, and dignity to fear. We stretch and pull the weight of the word to our very-needs, and in doing so we see it lose its shape (what the word means), but not the power.

Much of what society does is justified by the truth it believes it holds. Laws are written. Freedoms revoked. Resources distributed. Lives protected or abandoned. If all of this hangs on the presumption that the truth spoken of is real, everlasting, and just. But, if truth is shaped by society, then so do the structures that depend on it.

Empirical truth is supposed to be the anchor. The thing that doesn’t move when everything else does. The Earth spins. The virus spreads. The body decays. These are not open to belief. They are measurable, observable, repeatable. But what we see happen in society is that empirical truths exist when society is willing to carry them.

V. When Facts Depend on Attention

We assume that what can be proven will be accepted, but that is not how society works. The facts are inert, however they do nothing until culture gives them space, and people give them attention. So while empirical truth remains untouched, in principle, it is subject to a social frame: delayed, doubted, misused, or politicised.

We say we believe in science, reason and evidence, but more often we believe in what makes sense to us, what protects us, and what eases our fear. When empirical aligns with the emotional, it gains traction.

The persistence of flat-earth belief is often mocked as ignorance, but it reveals something deeper. The evidence for a spherical Earth has not changed. Satellites circle it. Ships disappear over the horizon, as geometry predicts. Yet belief still organises itself around identity and community, rather than evidence. The Earth remains round in the heavens, but in some communities it becomes flat again through language alone.

Empirical truth may be stable in the universe, but it is flexible in society. It waits to be acknowledged, and if enough people choose not to, it simply waits longer.

VI. The Truths We Live By

And so we live with the word truth as if it were solid, unmoving, and immune. We use it in arguments, in rituals, in law and love and policy. We raise children on it. We lose friendships over it. We speak it as if it justifies everything, when maybe it only ever reveals what we’re willing to protect. Not what is, but what must be treated as real in order for the world we’ve built to keep standing.

We don’t need to discard the word. But maybe we need to hold it differently.

Less like a compass, more like a lens.

Less like a destination, more like a mirror.