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Barack Obama pinpointed a central conflict in American politics back in 2004 while talking with a group of Google executives, “Many people – they’re just misinformed,” he said. “They just don’t have enough information, or they’re not professionals at sorting out all the information that’s out there, and so our political process gets skewed.”

Information overload is a bad problem, but the future U.S. president’s seemingly anodyne solution was even worse. “If you give them good information, their instincts are good and they will make good decisions. And the president has the bully pulpit to give them good information.”

Obama’s offer of guidance through the thickets of information recalls Ronald Reagan’s quip, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

The sheer number of facts has always outstripped the mind’s ability to sift and sort them. Progress is real – we know far more than we used to – but there is also far more to know, so we live in more comfort and the same general state of confusion.

In perhaps humanity’s greatest achievement, our ancient ancestors created narratives to try to make sense of it all. They picked out the facts that really mattered, the good information, and bundled them into stories. This feat provided us with the one thing we craved even more than love – certainty – as storytellers sold themselves as truth-tellers.

Problem is, everybody has a story – history is largely the record of the battle between his story and ours.

Politics and culture arose to settle these differences. Here’s what we believe. Blessedly, official narratives have bound communities together for common action. But have also led to repression against those who had other ideas about what constitutes good information – and wars against nonbelievers with land and booty for the taking. At bottom, we know that we don’t know it all, that stories always change and evolve, but at any given moment, we act as if we do. Oh, the humanity!

This eternal dynamic has become red hot in recent years as technological innovations have helped make the battle over good information a defining feature of contemporary culture (for a deep dive into this subject, see Jacob Siegel’s smart new book, “The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control,” which he discussed recently on the RCI Podcast).

The rise of smartphones and social media has given everybody a printing press, vastly expanding the amount and flow of both credible and wacky information. Instead of celebrating this flowering of discourse, governments and powerful business interests have viewed unfettered speech as a threat. Rather than engaging in a flawed but noble effort to try to set the record straight as best they can, they have harnessed a range of weapons to combat facts and ideas that challenge their own preferred narratives.

Progressives – who, at least since Woodrow Wilson’s administration, have believed in the power of experts to conquer knowledge – have been especially dedicated to this dubious task. Convinced that they do not possess opinions, but scientific facts, they view dissent as a failure of understanding. If people knew what I know, they would submit to my designs.

When a populist movement arose during Obama’s presidency, leading to the election of Donald Trump, elites were forced to acknowledge that many people might never see their light. Instead of tweaking their message (or, God forbid, changing some of their unpopular policies), they sought to silence and kneecap their critics. They mounted pressure campaigns, including those exposed in the Twitter files, and reintroduced the Orwellian terms “disinformation” and “misinformation,” and even introduced a new one – “malinformation” – to cast their censorious efforts as instruments of truth.

Powerful forces on the right followed the same impulse, albeit with a different tack. While progressives wrapped their skullduggery in high-minded principles, Trump and his allies have taken a bare-knuckles approach to attacking dissent. Instead of silencing critics, they browbeat them, openly branding press outlets they don’t like as “fake news” and “enemies of the people” while threatening to revoke broadcast licenses.

As the nation’s two major political parties pummel us with tsunamis of conflicting narratives, the quest for good information can seem like tilting at windmills.

All that would be bad enough, but even if Democrats and Republicans were to act in a more civic-minded manner, one more giant complication remains. Stretching back at least to Nietzsche and William James, influential thinkers have concluded that truth itself is an illusion. Our thoughts are not deep-sea anchors but buoys bobbing to-and-fro on the roiling surface.

While this insight might seem like a long-overdue acknowledgment of the shaky nature of the stories we embrace to understand the world, our response to it has been filled with denial. Instead of engendering skepticism and humility, this philosophical uncertainty has given rise to strident assertions of … certainty.

On an individual level, we have replaced the concept of universal truths with the idea of personal truths. We are always right because expressing “my truth” makes each of us a little god, secure in the unassailable correctness of whatever information or belief system we deem virtuous, at least in the moment. Much of the anger and division in our country stems from the frustration people feel when the world doesn’t bend to their will.

On a societal level, however, this radical individualism has spawned groupthink tribalism – human beings are complicated! In a world of near-infinite stories and truths, we have outsourced the necessary process of making sense of them all, largely to politicians and news outlets who are happy to thunder their narratives with absolute certitude, all in the cause of telling us what we should believe.

The competing echo chambers on the left and right are not committed to presenting accurate information, but rather what they consider politically advantageous information. They don’t seek to inform or even persuade a compliant public but to instruct. The dissembling of the New York Times, NPR, and other progressive forces is matched by President Trump’s willingness to say whatever it takes to advance his agenda. In a world where there is no universal truth, what constitutes a lie?

Each of us probably believes we can answer that question, though humility demands we acknowledge that others will give an opposite answer. We might believe we can rise above the spin, but it’s hard to deny our dependence on the spinmeisters. As Siegel observes in “The Information State,” “It turns out that the most informed citizen who dutifully consumes the news is also the easiest to propagandize.”

We are not doomed. Reality, which exists no matter what we think, always imposes its will in the long-run. But we live in the short-run, and right now we are stuck in a fractious mess where the lines between good and bad information are hard to see. I wish I had a magic cure, instead of just some well-worn but useful advice: Keep an open mind. Be skeptical. If your mother says she loves you, check it out. Trust, but verify.

J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics. Follow him on X @jpederzane.

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