In a preliminary injunction issued against the White House and federal agencies on Tuesday in Missouri v. Biden, Judge Terry Doughty eviscerated government actors for colluding with social media companies to censor users’ protected speech in the name of eliminating “misinformation.”
Doughty, as others have done, compares the government censorship to Orwell’s hypothetical “Ministry of Truth.” But Orwell’s satirical title gives the speech police too much credit: It assumes “truth” is still a functional part of their vocabulary. No, our censors speak in terms of “misinformation.”
The perversion of truth is falsehood; misinformation is just the perversion of information. Truth has a moral component; information doesn’t. Years of moral relativism have eroded our cultural understanding of “truth” as a knowable, agreed-upon concept — and in our modern world, all we’re left with is an infinite supply of information.
Truth, Discerned in Nature by Reason
For most of Western history, philosophers and laymen alike have agreed upon the existence of “truth,” as a factual concept but also as a moral one.
Plato said the “true philosophers” were those “who are lovers of the vision of truth,” which he described in terms of an ideal reality that transcended the imperfect reflections of truth, goodness, and beauty in the natural world. Similarly, Cicero believed in the existence of a natural law that could be understood via man’s reason.
Christianity describes the law being written on the hearts of men in similar terms, and presents the good, true, and beautiful as originating from
