THE LIE IN POLITICS:

Reflections on contemporary fake news in the light of an essay by Hannah Arendt on the Pentagon Documents. The lessons of history.

Abstract

This article is the result of an investigation carried out between September 2022 and February 2023, which addressed the theme of Traditionalism and the emergence of the extreme right or alternative right (alt right) both in Brazil and in the countries of the western hemisphere, especially Europe and North America. Concepts and categories related to this topic were scanned, including fake news, hate speech, belief systems, scientific denialism, mass, people, destitution of rights and political and power relations, among others. The explanation begins with the presentation of contemporary events related to these categories and later, using the technique of successive scansions, the concepts and categories are decomposed and rearranged in another order of meaning, in order to re-signify terms and original categories. The final considerations reinforce the proposition that social theory should be modeled by observing the contemporary social reality experienced by the researcher in the investigation work, either when exposing the understanding about the new realities imposed by the digital world or the realities created as an information society or by presenting new possibilities of interpretation of what was experienced. Likewise, the articulation between categories such as mass, crowd, herd and cattle was exposed as roots components of the political fabric in which we find ourselves entangled, and this group component expresses a powerful idea of ​​communication, which makes objective situations apprehensible as symbolic values and points of view shared by transforming the complexity of the real into simple binary categories.