In the early days of my journalism career, truth was sacred. Senior editors drilled into us one golden rule: get your facts straight. Every story passed through three rigorous gateways before it ever saw the light of day. And still, errors slipped through. But at least we tried. Accuracy was our north star.

Fast forward to today, and the landscape looks unrecognizable. In this noisy digital wilderness, truth no longer leads the conversation, struggling to be heard at all. The media ecosystem is thick with half-truths, deception, and outright hate. It’s as if honesty has been shoved into the backseat while outrage grabs the wheel.

Outrage sells more than sex

There was a time when the media industry lived by the motto “sex sells.” Not anymore. The new currency is outrage. Social media giants have learned that anger drives engagement, and engagement drives profit. So, the algorithms are tuned to reward the most divisive, shocking, and hate-fueled content. The more we rage, the more we stay online, and the more the profit margin rises.

And the result? We see it all around us. Acts of kindness, respect, and compassion are drowned out by cruelty and contempt. Civil disagreement has been replaced by digital warfare. When hate becomes the loudest voice in the room, it doesn’t just poison our feeds. It poisons the mind. It reshapes how we think, speak, and treat one another, leaving empathy gasping for breath.

I’ve often pondered how individuals can fabricate and obscure with such unwavering conviction that one might almost be inclined to believe them. It dawned on me that evil isn’t merely a religious concept but a stark reality, inhabited by individuals devoid of all moral compass, whose behavior lies far beyond what society deems ethical or humane.

In the murky waters of social media, these purveyors of malicious messaging are easy to spot if we care to look more closely. They lack empathy and have no qualms about causing harm or suffering. They are masters of manipulation, twisting language and gaslighting their audiences until truth itself becomes unrecognizable. They crave control, using pressure, humiliation, and intimidation to assert dominance.

Externally, they often appear charismatic. They draw people in, earning trust while quietly advancing their own self-serving agendas. We see this pattern time and again, especially among political demagogues and religious cult leaders.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: if you haven’t confronted your own inner darkness, your fear, anger, shame, and resentment, you are easy prey. These manipulators will tell you that your pain is someone else’s fault: the fault of those who look different, think differently, or believe differently. Once that narrative takes hold, it’s only a short step to blind allegiance, and then to violence.

Blind obedience is the enemy of truth. That’s why authoritarians always seek to destroy a free press — through lawsuits, legislation, imprisonment, torture, and finally murder, as we see in today’s Russia. Subservience and blind allegiance are the death knell of progress.

A free media and a free mind demand curiosity, nuance, and the courage to look between the lines. Authoritarianism thrives on division, drawing sharp lines between “us” and “them,” demanding loyalty to one story, one truth, one voice. But when we surrender our capacity for critical thought, we surrender reality itself. We live not in truth but in illusion.

In diverse societies like South Africa, the United States, Israel, or India, this danger is magnified. Each tribe, religion, or political party clings to its own version of truth, incapable of hearing another’s. From there, it becomes frighteningly easy to dehumanize the “other” — to see them as enemy, not neighbor. And from that poisoned soil, violence grows.

In Kabbalistic thought, this distortion is known as sheker — falsehood. It narrows our vision until reality itself bends and fractures. Truth, emet, by contrast, is expansive. It invites balance, curiosity, and humility. To tell the truth is not merely to report facts — it is to resist illusion and to participate in the divine work of sustaining and healing the world.

Because emet, truth, is eternal. Even when forgotten or ignored, it does not vanish. The truths we speak — the words we write, the stories we tell — become sparks of light woven into creation itself. Speaking truth is sacred labor. It matters, even when no one listens, even when the world seems to have moved on.

One of our most radical acts is to keep telling the truth, steadily, humbly, and with love. To quote the great 13th-century Mystic Meister Eckhart:

“Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go.”

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S.: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in my latest book, Sages, Saints, and Sinners. Get it today on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever good books are sold.