Why do good people suffer while evil flourishes like the old bay tree? This ancient question has reappeared with renewed force in our post-Brexit, post-President-elect Trump world. Only this time it’s vexing professionals who pride themselves on their superior knowledge and enlightenment but who find their expertise scorned (by their intellectual inferiors, no less) and their political adversaries victorious.

Suffering cannot be wished away. But it can be made sufferable if it is rationalised. In an information age, the way to rationalise the victory of ignorance is to declare that the truth and facts no longer matter for the hoi-polloi. That we live in a post-truth society, although the truth will out, some day, and the truthful will be vindicated.

Like all rationalisations, this one is based less on the best interpretation of the facts and more on class prejudice and gut feelings. Which is to say it’s guilty of the same sin it diagnoses in Brexit and Trump voters.

Let’s take that bit by bit. First, is the post-truth society a new kind of society?

Put it this way. Were we living in a truth-based Europe when kings stalked the earth and claimed a divine right to rule? Witches were burned in the name of the truth – but wasn’t that truth just a delusional gut feeling?

Ah, but I hear someone mutter that, in the meantime, the Enlightenment happened. However, that didn’t stop politicians from pandering to prejudice and going with their gut while needlessly spilling the guts of others.

And I don’t just mean up to World War I. It goes all the way up to our times, with mainstream European politicians – the best and the brightest – insisting on austerity economics, making things worse, despite the catastrophic results. Despite everything economic history says.

Ignoring the facts isn’t a 10-year wonder, going back only to the regrettable reign of George Bush the Ignoracious (compared with Trump, he wore his ignorance lightly and with such southern grace). It has a long genealogy and touches socialism, centrism and conservatism alike.

Significantly, it touches pundits, as well. Studies on their ability to predict events, in areas they are supposedly expert in, show their forecasting ability is often about as reliable as a coin toss.

Second, is it true that Brexit voters and Trump voters didn’t care about the truth? No.

Some had good reasons to distrust experts. Over 20 years ago, President Bill Clinton tried to make the disruptions of globalisation comprehensible and sufferable for the displaced working and middle classes in the US. So he spoke of the need to make the nation ‘competitive’.

Making the US competitive would entail a painful transition but, in the end, make it more affluent, raising standards for everyone. So went the justification of the loss of manufacturing jobs and the signing of free trade agreements.

The problem is not that electoral majorities have stopped caring about the truth. It is that they believe that society is based on a lie

Well, that was economic nonsense. Nations don’t compete economically the way firms do. Globalisation might give net national gains – but that’s only because the winners outnumber the losers.

Would you comfort a loser with that? But that’s exactly what has been spouted over the last quarter of a century by the majority of mainstream politicians and pundits.

Naturally, it never tallied with the experience of the losers. They were left with fewer and fewer reasons to believe the experts.

That wasn’t because they don’t care about the truth. It’s because they believe the experts and pundits often lie or massage the truth.

That distrust has some basis in the truth.

The Brexit campaign is often mentioned as an example of how facts have ceased to matter. There may be a simpler explanation for how that campaign went. Separate studies of the campaign conducted by Cardiff and Loughborough universities show that statistical claims were challenged by the media in very few cases. Conservative and UKIP voices dominated.

The Cardiff research also shows that the BBC’s economic reporting reflects a very narrow set of economic ideas, often ones that have not proven very good at making sense of experience.

Third, do we have more politicians pandering to prejudice and bypassing the truth?

The only evidence we do have is that we are catching politicians lying more often than before. But that may be because it has become easier to fact-check politicians and to access video footage of them pandering shamelessly to different audiences.

So is there nothing new about our age?

Well, the spectacle of Western societies in the grip of magical thinking – of majorities voting for politicians making promises they cannot possibly keep – might appear new. In European lore, it’s usually something associated with the non-Western world. (It’s less novel to anthropologists, who have been more alert to the magical thinking embedded in what passes for rule by experts.)

But this still remains a mistaken way of defining the issue. The problem is not that electoral majorities have stopped caring about the truth. It is that they believe that society is based on a lie.

Their votes are a denunciation of this fundamental lie – even if, with that vote, they’ve regretably voted for politicians who lied their way to victory.

You cannot denounce lies without having a standard of truth. The problem here is that there are two kinds of relevant truth, neither of which should be ignored.

There is, first, the truth about how things work in economic and organisational terms. It’s the truth told by numbers. The kind of knowledge that can make us certain that, if Trump does implement his economic plan in full, its contradictions will fuel inflation and have all kinds of nasty consequences. You just have to hope that the institutional checks and balances will restrain him.

Then there is the truth of experience – how we give direction, cohesion and coherence to our lives when we experience unfairness and suffering. It’s the truth told by life stories and what makes them meaningful.

When we no longer have convincing ways to explain individual and community failures, things stop making sense. When the authorities continue to mouth platitudes, the centre no longer holds. The world seems out of joint. It appears to be based on lies.

Given that we know that social cohesion is also a factor in economic success, to ignore the truth of experience is as economically irresponsible as flaunting your ignorance of the causes of inflation.

And yet, for the last several years, many Western governments have spoken and behaved as though they were indifferent to the meaningfulness of many voters’ economic lives. Their reasons and assurances have not been compelling.

The ability of governments to explain and justify things has not kept up with economic change. Hence why so many politicians seem like incurable liars.

It also doesn’t help that what they and the media say is often evidently influenced by powerful commercial interests.

So what we have is not a post-truth society. It’s a society in which the truth of how things work is painfully dislocated from how we make sense of experience. The numbers don’t fit the stories. Virtue appears stupid, the pieties are hollow. So why shouldn’t we all be cynics? Why not go with our gut?

We’re hardly the only society on record to experience this divorce. But that doesn’t make the convulsions less painful.

ranierfsadni@europe.com