Relational Solipsism and the Post-Truth Condition

Donald Trump did not invent the post-truth world. He merely capitalized on it. Long before Twitter became a political weapon and fact-checking a performative ritual, there existed a certain personality type: individuals for whom truth is relational rather than objective. They do not necessarily lie; they genuinely believe that disagreement is aggression, that evidence is a social maneuver, and that objectivity is a fiction upheld by power. In their view, truth is not discovered but negotiated.

This mindset echoes postmodern thought, though only in caricature. It is not the critical skepticism of Foucault or Lyotard, but a defensive distortion of it. Instead of questioning power structures, it rejects the possibility of shared reality altogether. Call it relational solipsism: a belief that feelings outrank facts, and that contradiction wounds rather than challenges.

People like this are not uncommon. They appear in academia, in families, in meetings, and in comment sections. They interpret argument as hostility, and correction as humiliation. Presenting them with data, no matter how gently, feels to them like an attack. To such minds, truth does not stand apart from relationship; every assertion signals either respect or dominance. Debate becomes less a search for clarity than a ritual of pecking order.

This worldview remained largely contained until it found a platform. Historically, these individuals rarely ascended to power. Their emotional reasoning made them seem irrational, their defensiveness a liability. But as information splintered and performance eclipsed substance, the conditions changed. The solipsist began to flourish—not quietly, but visibly, in high office and national discourse.

Trump is not unprecedented. He is a familiar archetype: someone who equates persuasion with dominance, contradiction with betrayal, and reality with public perception. What is novel is not the personality but the amplification. Social media rewards outrage and self-victimization, not accuracy. In such an environment, the solipsist does not merely survive; he thrives.

What makes the term "post-truth" misleading is its implication of a rupture. In fact, this mentality has always existed. What is new is its reach. Platforms now transmit it frictionlessly and reward its emotional appeals. Outrage cloaked in grievance travels faster than measured thought.

Still, this is not a new philosophical position. It is not even a coherent one. It is a failure to distinguish between feeling and thinking, between being wounded and being wrong. Yet we increasingly mistake it for insight. We tolerate it in meetings, excuse it in public figures, and even dignify it as resistance to dominant narratives.

If we wish to navigate this fog, we must stop indulging the confusion. Relational solipsism is not a perspective; it is an evasion. It corrodes institutions and distorts discourse. Intellectual honesty begins to feel violent in such a climate, because truth is misread as betrayal. But disagreement is not disrespect. Evidence is not manipulation. Reality does not depend on popularity, volume, or emotion.

This is not a plea for cold detachment. We are social beings, shaped by context. But we must still draw a line. Otherwise, we will continue to mistake charisma for competence, grievance for insight, and solipsism for leadership. And that is not only a philosophical failure. It is a political one.

Narcissism’s Telltale Glitter

I spent many years under governments that preferred statues to citizens: first  thirty years in the  Soviet Union, and then three years in Putin's Russia. Censorship, political repressions, the whole sulfurous inventory, those were the thunderclaps everyone heard. Yet what lingers in my memory are the quieter tremors: the leaders' portrait wedged above every blackboard, the municipal hall suddenly renamed for the leader’s mother. Tyranny, like a magician, distracts with grand gestures while doing its finest work in the margins.

That is why the recent rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a self-styled immunologist makes me twitch. Kennedy is, to be fair, an able environmental lawyer with a Harvard B.A. in American history and a J.D. from the University of Virginia. What he is not, even on weekends, is a virologist, epidemiologist, or bench scientist. Nevertheless he insists that one childhood vaccine formulation is superior, that another is a covert toxin, and that the global medical consensus is merely a cartel of dull minds lacking the spark of his singular insight. Replace “vaccine” with “five-year plan” and you have the classic strongman monologue: I alone know what's going on.

Autocrats survive on the conviction that they possess a mystical surplus of competence. Humility is not merely inconvenient; it is subversive. A leader who admits ignorance invites comparison, inquiry, ultimately accountability. Thus the soft autocratic move is to dismiss experts (they are “bureaucrats”), elevate personal instinct (“I trust my gut”), and surround oneself with flattering stagecraft.

Americans usually fixate on the epic assaults: who will muzzle the press, who will subvert the courts. They should; institutions deserve defense. Yet institutions are easier to rally around precisely because their violation is visible. We raise money, litigate, march. What escapes notice are the minor vanity projects that prime a populace to accept disproportionate power. When a hotel lobby in Florida features a forty-foot oil portrait of its proprietor, or when a candidate boasts he will “hire only the best people” yet purges each aide who utters a discouraging word, we shrug: branding, personality, harmless showmanship. In the country I once called home, those flourishes were the early sirens. By the time the statues went up, the locks were already on the ballot boxes.

Kennedy’s hubris is not the same as gulags, and I am not suggesting equivalence. The United States still bristles with checks: governors, media, courts, muckraking podcasters, and a citizenry that can weaponize sarcasm within seconds of a livestream. That layered resilience makes me a bit more sanguine about surviving a frontal assault. What worries me are the micro-doses of autocratic style that accumulate like heavy metals. Celebrate military parades on civilian avenues often enough and uniforms start to feel more legitimate than suits. Slap your name on the new White House ballroom, and every subsequent ribbon-cutting becomes an affirmation that private vanity and public good are the same enterprise.

Democracy runs on the unglamorous fuel of self-doubt. In higher education, we try to instill critical thinking, which first has to apply to oneself. Democracy asks its leaders to check footnotes, convene committees, lose arguments on C-SPAN, and apologize when they bungle the statistics (not fire the statistician). None of that photographs well, which is precisely the point. A system that relies on ordinary mortals must normalize ordinariness. When a politician insists he is the oracle among clerks, reach for your skepticism as instinctively as fastening a seatbelt.

So yes, America can withstand a would-be autocrat. The constitutional levees are high. But vigilance is less about scanning the horizon for cavalry and more about noticing the confetti at our feet. Dictatorship creeps in on cat paws wearing a custom-tailored sash. If we learn to laugh at the sash before it becomes mandatory attire, the thunderclap may never come.