There are times in history when truth ceases to be a shared currency and becomes instead a matter of personal taste. Ours is such a time. The new sovereigns of the modern world is not reason, not faith, not even fear — it is noise. Endless, pulsating, self-replicating noise.
The leaders of this age is not a builders of systems but destroyers of meanings. They discovered that words need not describe reality — they can replace it. When confronted with facts, they do not argue; they perform. Each contradiction is deliberate, each scandal a spark to keep the engine running. The purpose of communication is no longer to persuade but to exhaust. If everyone is shouting, no one has the energy to notice who is stealing the silverware.
They pretend to be anti-establishment while embodying power in its rawest form: unaccountable, personal, theatrical. Their followers love them not because they believe them, but because they make belief itself feel irrelevant. The truth, after all, is difficult; loyalty is easy. And so, with a shrug and a smirk, entire nations slide into a comfortable cynicism: nothing is true, everything is permitted.
They did not invent this technique — they merely perfected it. Others before them learned that confusion can be more effective than censorship. The old dictators silenced their enemies; the new ones drown them in trivia. Instead of closing newspapers, they fill them with noise. Instead of burning books, they flood the digital shelves with conspiracy and contradiction until meaning itself becomes suspect. The citizen, overwhelmed, withdraws into irony and fatigue. The rulers smile — a tired public is a manageable one.
What makes this phenomenon particularly dangerous is its infectiousness. It crosses borders faster than any ideology. It adapts to accents, colours, and contexts. It wears the mask of humour, of authenticity, of being “against the system.” It flatters the weary, telling them that complexity is deception and that only the loudest voice can be trusted. It feeds on resentment, and in doing so, it manufactures more of it.
Some call it populism, others nationalism, but the label is irrelevant. Its essence is contempt — for expertise, for nuance, for the very idea that facts exist independent of feelings. It thrives on humiliation: the pleasure of watching the clever stumble, the professional blush, the decent hesitate. It tells the crowd that decency itself is a con trick, that morality is weakness, and that cruelty is the only proof of strength left in a hypocritical world.
You can recognise such a regime not by its ideology but by its atmosphere. Jokes become weapons, language turns slippery, laughter grows mean. The press is “enemies of the people.” Courts are “corrupt.” Scientists are “political.” The leaders, meanwhile, become the only trustworthy narrators of reality. They cannot fail — they can only be betrayed. The circle closes, and the public begins to whisper what they already know but dare not say aloud. That is how freedom dies now: not in fear, but in ridicule.
This is not merely a political change; it is a civilisational regression. Democracies depend not on agreement but on a shared respect for evidence, for argument, for the possibility of being wrong. Once those habits vanish, the rest follows naturally — accountability, law, trust. The institutions remain standing, like theatre sets, but the play they once hosted is over. The audience stays, out of habit, but the actors improvise nonsense, and everyone pretends not to notice.
Some still insist that this is only a phase — that noise burns itself out. But history suggests otherwise. Noise consolidates. It creates fatigue, and fatigue creates surrender. It is difficult to fight a lie repeated a thousand times with a truth whispered once. The rational mind seeks patterns; the propagandist supplies them. And so the citizens, even those who despise the show, continue to watch, because the alternative — silence — feels like defeat.
The antidote will not come from louder shouting, nor from moral outrage, both of which are already part of the spectacle. It must come from something quieter and far more demanding: the rediscovery of seriousness. To speak carefully, to listen honestly, to verify before sharing — these are revolutionary acts in the empire of noise. To insist that words have meaning, that evidence matters, that cruelty is not wit — this is resistance now.
The tragedy of our time is not that one person learned to manipulate the truth. It is that so many discovered they preferred the lie. The comfort of certainty, the thrill of contempt, the satisfaction of belonging to a tribe that calls itself awake — these are pleasures hard to surrender. But every civilisation that surrendered to them eventually found that contempt is a poor substitute for dignity, and noise a fragile foundation for power.
And so, as the slogans grow louder and the jokes crueller, the only question worth asking is the simplest one:
When the shouting finally stops, who will still remember what the truth sounded like?
