How would it feel to you if you could count on every institution you encountered to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? How would your life change? What would happen to values?
We sometimes tell ourselves we are trapped in a post-truth world. But we rarely stop to ask what it would feel like if we were not — if every institution we encountered could be trusted to speak truthfully. Not just individuals acting with integrity, but the media, corporations, governments.
Think of what that would mean in practice. A media you could trust. Politicians who could not legally mislead you. Platforms held to account for the information they spread. How would that feel? What difference would it make to our social lives, our political lives, our economics, our sense of progress and values as a civilisation? How would it change the way we speak to one another, person to person?
There are already people working on this. In the UK, Compassion in Politics has tabled an amendment to the Public Accountability Bill that would make it a criminal offence for politicians to deliberately mislead the public. In the US, former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman argues in Liar’s Kingdom that America’s vulnerability to political deception stems from a specific legal flaw — one that can be fixed.
And now George Kinder’s FIAT, Fiduciary In All Things, proposes that all institutions, politicians, journalists, platforms and algorithms be held to a fiduciary standard regarding the truth. Although this may seem utopian, there are multiple paths to its success. One would be if a single US state were to pass legislation requiring every institution doing business there to be fiduciary in all things, it could transform the whole country.
This session brings these ideas into the room and asks what each of us can do to make it real and what is the role of volunteering?
