South Africa is in the throes of the Madlanga Commission, established by President Cyril Ramaphosa to investigate corruption and malfeasance in the country’s police service. As we follow live coverage of the inquiry, it’s often difficult to discern who is the good cop and who is the bad one.

It is precisely in inquiries such as the Madlanga Commission that the law is used as a tool to uncover truth. Yet there are ominous trends beyond South Africa: legal edifices are being challenged and dismantled, making it increasingly difficult to rectify wrongs or to prevent the justification of wrongdoing through the abuse of law under the pretence of using the existing system. Law itself is becoming a weapon against truth.

If anything, it seems legal systems and judiciaries are being bent towards what George Orwell called “new speak’, which is a regime of controlled vocabulary and constrained ways of thinking, inserted under the cover of democracy so that the official version of the world becomes the only one.

What truth is, is being eroded daily by the pervasiveness of new technology and social media.

Modern society has relied on scientific inquiry to replace earlier reliance on mythology, secret knowledge from the occult, or sources of understanding derived from the unseen.

Or, put another way, tackled like philosopher Emmanuel Kant did in his Critique of Pure Reason, when he posed the long-standing philosophical question about how we get to know about the world – what we may call the epistemic gap between noumena (things in themselves as they are) and phenomena (things as they appear to us).

In the use of the dark arts of deception, misinformation and propaganda, as can be seen in the work of Edward Bernays, this gap between knowing reality and illusion is exploited in the game of persuasion by blurring the line between truth and falsehood. All this is designed to manufacture consent rather than enable self-verification.

Kant’s definition of the enlightenment held the premise that it was “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity”. We may now be seeing the anti-Kant – the entrance into an age of intellectual immaturity and the collapse of reason.

I once watched a YouTube interview, thinking that it was a prominent figure speaking, only to realise that the image was AI generated. There are now a growing number of such YouTube products where AI-generated impersonations are widespread.

The commentary was compelling and seemed authentic, but the impersonation itself was false.

It points to three things about our relation with truth. First, we rely on truth in order to speak meaningfully about the world, through attribution to the right authority or evidence. Second, the distortion of truth now travels at near-light speed – fact-checking struggles to keep up, and by the time corrections arrive, perceptions have already congealed, becoming difficult to reverse. Third, rapid information pathways are viral, and the power of misinformation can generate panic, diversion and unfounded views.

If there is a danger in AI, it is its potential to fracture human cohesion through polarisation. The way truth is engaged on these platforms will help determine the fate of social cohesion.

The entire Western truth infrastructure has depended on the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood – whether in challenging false beliefs or in upholding evidence-based inquiry that must withstand falsifiability, to use Karl Popper’s criterion. True liberal values depend on the culture through which public opinion is formed. As John Stuart Mill argued, maturity lies not in suppressing false beliefs, but in engaging them through tolerant argumentation. The health of public discourse depends on preserving public spaces for debate while maintaining rigorous enquiry.

Powerful figures have learnt to insert “fake facts” in order to construct false truths. Such claims can be used to attack individuals or ideas that are disliked, and to assert influence or control.

It does not require an unhinged autocrat to falsify facts. We must also ask how we contribute to the erosion of truth when we greenwash environmental credentials through false claims and deception.

And worse, when we disagree with others in a manner that ‘cancels’ their views, we further weaken a culture of truth-seeking.

What we are facing is the substitution of reality with illusion, with the latter increasingly amplified. Raw power has a Faustian bargain with untruth: the task of untruth is to present itself as truth in the service of power.