"But if the need for facts is predicated on a vision of a concrete future that you are trying to achieve, then when that future disappears, what is the point of facts? Why would you want them if they tell you that your children will be poorer than you? That all versions of the future are unpromising? And why should you trust the purveyors of facts – the media and academics, think tanks, statesmen? And so the politician who makes a big show of rejecting facts, who validates the pleasure of spouting nonsense, who indulges in a full, anarchic liberation from coherence, from glum reality, becomes attractive. That enough Americans could vote for someone like Donald Trump, a man with so little regard for making sense, whose many contradictory messages never add up to any very stable meaning, was partly possible because voters felt they weren’t invested in any larger evidence-based future. Indeed, in his very incoherence lies the pleasure. All the madness you feel, you can now let it out and it’s OK. The joy of Trump is to validate the pleasure of spouting shit, the joy of pure emotion, often anger, without any sense."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Television producersImmigrants to the United KingdomJournalists from the United KingdomJewish peopleAuthors from the Soviet Union‎
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Pomerantsev
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Peter Pomerantsev
5 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Peter Pomerantsev →
Related Quotes
"What if the powerful can use ‘information abundance’ to find new ways of stifling you, flipping the ideal of freedom …"
"Conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose cens…"
"This is the potential nightmare of the new media: the idea that our data might know more about us than we do, and tha…"
"Forty years have passed since my parents were pursued by the KGB for pursuing the simple right to read, to write, to …"
"[Responding to the perceived surrealism of Clangers] They're surreal but logical. I have a strong prejudice against f…"
"We would go to the BBC once a year, show them the films we'd made, and they would say, "Yes, lovely, now what are you…"
"That was all, but I was fizzing with excitement. It didn't matter what the picture was of. It didn't matter that Mast…"
"I was also invited to give a couple of informal seminars to the Animation School at the RCA. These were so informal t…"
"The films we made were aimed at the Head of Department at the BBC, who was about 57 at the time, and she was a nice l…"
"Being creative, having to do something new, invent something, alter things, in order to show you're still there is a …"