Between 1945 and 2024, the rulers of Britain, the USA, and the West more broadly, were arrested by a set of moral visions—a kind of collective dream—which came to dominate all their thoughts and actions. These visions were also inculcated in the minds of the people over whom they ruled by robust mass propaganda methods to create a moral unity between the elites and the governed.
This unity, which had persisted from the end of World War II, had begun to break down by 2016. However, at the time of writing, which is marked by political polarization, both sides continue to cling on to some remnant of the old moral visions.
I will call this collective mindset the Boomer Truth Regime because its lifespan coincides with that of the Baby Boomer generation.
Myth is truer than history, or at least it matters more. The stories people tell about themselves, how they view themselves, and how they justify their own actions to themselves have a greater impact on how people regulate their behavior than whatever can be offered by the raw facts. Despite the protestations of historians, it is Shakespeare’s Richard III who is remembered and not the real man, just as it is Winston Churchill’s version of World War II that is remembered and not what actually happened. A myth is deeper than mere narrative, it is something that prefigures discourse and operates on a level “underneath the mind.”
In every society, in every epoch, a hegemonic mode of thought will be all-pervasive such that its non-adherents will be branded as heretics, pariahs, or madmen. This is something stronger than mere ideology or worldview; it is rather an almost hermetically sealed system of a priori assumptions and values that govern how men and women relate to the world around them and to their history and culture. This we call a “truth regime.” The phrase was coined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1976:
Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth—that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.
A truth regime prefigures and conditions not only what is thinkable but also, and perhaps more pivotally, what is unthinkable.
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