Babel 2.0: Post-Truth makes it difficult to build new tower.

One of the most metaphorical images in the Bible is of mankind working together to build a tower that reached Heaven. Apparently, the work was going so well that God felt He had to confuse languages, scatter people and make them abandon the affair. As if we were coming after His job.

From a laic standpoint, the story paraphrases the existence of foreign dialects and languages.

Despite the initial confusion, Babel 1.0 has the flair of paradise: meaning still meant the same thing around the world. ‘Le projet est foutu’ in French translated as ‘The project is screwed’ in English, and our ability to understand one another across dialects meant we could regroup for a new project in the future.

Babel 2.0, 2025 AD, no longer feels like paradise. It resembles a state of perpetual social crumbling instead. Meaning no longer means the same thing in the same language, let alone across borders. It decodes differently from sender to receiver and often encapsulates several meanings within the same sentence. There’s no point arguing over fixed positions; everything’s relative, everything’s circular as a result.

Some have called this the death of Objective Truth, the era of post-Truth, or the era of My Truth. The premise is simple, everyone has a right to their own perspective, every perspective is right by virtue of being heard, all perspectives are equal and acceptable because no one can hold more truth than anyone else – there isn’t any left to hold.

Can all perspectives be truthful, right and equal at the same time? How do you define what truthful, right and equal means when there’s no more objectivity to measure it against? And how do you handle the uncomfortable point that Truth, by definition, is exclusive?

Alas, it’s in the time of post-Truth and in the name of all perspectives being equal, that I find myself thinking primarily and hopefully writing secondarily about social and cultural shifts, their premises and messaging, and the way they impact the world of branding. Society and culture have always been central to our discipline, providing a foundation and a mirror for sense-checking the thinking and the work. It’s difficult to think when the sands are shifting and the purpose of this writing journey is to search for stability among the shifting sands we’re building on.

To be continued.

Unmistakably,

Irina