On Morality, the Illusion of Control, and the Zeitgeist
Chapter I – Introduction
1. Disinformation as a Threat
Disinformation and fake news are increasingly perceived as threats to our institutions and to the functioning of democratic societies. They are said to poison public debate, undermine trust, and erode social cohesion. In political speeches, policy documents, and media commentary alike, the phenomenon is presented as an urgent problem requiring decisive intervention.
By now, disinformation has long ceased to be merely a subject of debate. The European Commission has strengthened its regulatory response by incorporating the Code of Practice into the legal framework of the Digital Services Act, imposing sanctions on platforms such as Meta and X for non-compliance, and launching new programmes for media literacy and monitoring, all aimed at enhancing the resilience of citizens and societies.
This essay raises the question of whether the very obviousness with which this problematisation unfolds causes us to overlook the nature of the phenomenon itself. Is it appropriate to classify disinformation primarily as erroneous or deviant behaviour? Or might it be better understood as a symptom of the spirit of our time? To moralise symptoms is futile, much like taking a moral stance against the common cold. What is required instead is a phenomenological gaze, directed at the systemic and psychological undercurrents from which disinformation arises.
2. The Voice of Moral Authority
When moral authorities speak about disinformation, the phenomenon acquires an explicitly ethical character. In 2018, Pope Francis addressed the issue on World Communications Day, describing fake news as the work of the devil. He likened disinformation to the serpent that tempted Eve to eat from the forbidden tree: a seductive force that leads humanity away from truth. In later years, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic, this moral framing resurfaced.
Through such pronouncements, disinformation is no longer described merely as incorrect or harmful, but as morally reprehensible. The debate thereby shifts from questions of truth and meaning toward appeals for proper conduct, moral rectitude, and correct behaviour.
3. The Central Question
This moral interpretation is not confined to religious leaders. Politicians, administrators, and scientists likewise insist that disinformation must be combated—if necessary through regulation, censorship, or behavioural intervention. The underlying assumption is that disinformation represents a form of deviant behaviour that can, and should, be corrected.
Yet this assumption deserves closer scrutiny. For what if disinformation is not primarily an error to be repaired, but a phenomenon that reveals something essential about the time in which it emerges? The question that then imposes itself is no longer how disinformation can be stopped, but of what it is a symptom.
Chapter II
4. Disinformation Is Not Behaviour, but a Phenomenon
In this essay, disinformation is not understood as culpable behaviour on the part of individuals or groups, but as an autonomous phenomenon arising from broader social, cultural, and technological developments. Like phenomena such as loneliness, burnout, or polarisation, disinformation cannot be adequately understood by focusing exclusively on individual intentions or moral shortcomings.
Those who approach disinformation solely as error or deception implicitly assume the existence of a clear distinction between true and false information, between reliable and unreliable sources, and further assume that this distinction can be monitored and enforced by authorities. It is precisely this assumption that is now under strain.
From this perspective, disinformation is not a cause but a symptom: a visible expression of a deeper disruption in meaning-making, authority, and truth.
5. Moralisation as a Sign of Powerlessness
The moral condemnation of disinformation is understandable, yet it is not neutral. Moralisation suggests that a problem can be resolved through behavioural correction, regulation, or discipline. In doing so, it aligns with the modern belief in manageability: the conviction that social problems can be solved through appropriate interventions, rules, and techniques.
When this belief in manageability reaches its limits, the tone shifts. What can no longer be controlled becomes morally charged. Calls to combat disinformation through censorship, legislation, or moral outrage can therefore be read as signals of powerlessness—indications that familiar instruments are failing. It is telling that moral authorities such as the Pope once again enter the public arena. Does this point to a renaissance of religion—or rather to the impotence of modernity itself?
Instead of asking what produces disinformation, it is condemned. The phenomenon does not disappear as a result; it merely remains uncomprehended.
Chapter III – Zeitgeist
6. On the Impossibility of Distance
Anyone who attempts to understand the spirit of the age encounters a fundamental difficulty: we do not stand outside it. The Zeitgeist is not an object that can be observed from a neutral vantage point, but a constellation of assumptions, beliefs, and self-evidences of which we ourselves are a part. Just as a fish does not perceive the water in which it swims, human beings are rarely fully aware of the consciousness within which they live.
Accordingly, this essay does not claim to offer a comprehensive theory or a definitive explanatory model. Its point of departure is phenomenological: it seeks to describe phenomena as they present themselves, without immediately reducing them to causes, culprits, or solutions. Not in order to create distance, but precisely in order to remain close to what shows itself.
Such an approach does not presume a superior perspective. Rather, it acknowledges that every analysis is itself part of what it seeks to understand. The phenomena described here are not deviations from “society,” but expressions of it—including this text itself.
Chapter IV – Phenomena of Modernity – A Phenomenological Description
7. The Erosion of Authority and the Dictatorship of the Individual
Since the 1960s, many traditional authorities have been removed from their pedestals or actively pushed from them. Religious, political, scientific, and pedagogical authorities are no longer self-evidently recognised. Their claims are contested, their intentions distrusted, their positions relativised. This erosion does not stand on its own: authority derived its legitimacy from shared values and a shared reality. As these dissolve through individualisation, the ground of authority erodes with them.
Where authority disappears, no vacuum emerges, but rather a proliferation of self-appointed authorities. Increasingly, individuals come to regard themselves as sources of truth and meaning. The result is a fragmentation of perspectives in which mutual understanding becomes ever more difficult.
What was initially celebrated as individual freedom and liberation from collective constraint thus reveals another side. If everyone is right, does truth still exist? If everyone possesses their own truth, where do boundaries remain? The hypothesis that the dictatorship of the group would transform into the freedom of the individual proves, in practice, far less unambiguous. The collective order appears to have been replaced by a new form of dictatorship: that of the individual.
8. The Fragile Self
The promise of individualisation was immense. Members of the baby-boomer generation recall the euphoria of new freedoms, the belief that one could finally be oneself, liberated from imposed roles and structures. What this “self” precisely entailed, however, remained unclear.
These heightened expectations are not always fulfilled. One’s own truth does not automatically render life meaningful. In practice, autonomy and wisdom have not been produced, but ambivalence: Who am I? Am I good enough? Many experience a diminishing sense of footing, leading to growing insecurity. Spellbound, we stare at the screens of our smartphones, craving likes, while therapists are busier than ever.
The individual is incessantly addressed in terms of self-realisation, while simultaneously being measured, compared, and evaluated without pause. Advertising, social media, and peer groups instruct us on how to be: unique and special. This paradox generates stress, insecurity, and an increasing social divide.
Many individuals find themselves scarcely able to bear their own uniqueness. They seek refuge in identity groups in which similarity once again dominates—be it among activists, fraternity members, or football hooligans. The much-praised individualisation thus culminates in conformity and uniformity. The question “Who am I?” remains unanswered, while the longing for affirmation intensifies.
9. The Democratisation of News
Only a few decades ago, news production was a solid industry and the domain of professionals. Journalism required infrastructure, expertise, and institutional embedding. With the advent of the smartphone and platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and X, both the gathering and dissemination of news have been democratised. Every citizen potentially occupies a dual role: producer and consumer of news. The pop-art artist and media phenomenon Andy Warhol anticipated this development as early as 1968, predicting everyone’s “moment of fame.” In today’s narcissistic age, we eagerly celebrate this moment through selfie-posts.
This democratisation has led to an explosion of information, but also to a blurring of boundaries. Distinctions between news, opinion, marketing, and propaganda become increasingly difficult to draw. Senders are often unclear, interests remain concealed, and context is absent.
Where journalistic norms once aimed at objectification and interpretation, media now compete ever more fiercely for emotion and engagement. Algorithms amplify this dynamic by reinforcing personalised emotional bubbles. The result is a race to the bottom, in which speed and attention eclipse coherence and meaning.
10. Attention Creates Reality
In quantum theory, psychology, and spiritual traditions alike, the notion exists that attention shapes reality. Within today’s media landscape, this principle assumes an everyday form. Trivial incidents can, if they strike the right chord, escalate into media storms with tangible political consequences.
The proportionality of events is increasingly determined not by their societal significance, but by the number of clicks, likes, and retweets they generate. Beached whales, boisterous students, ministerial travel expenses, and torch-bearing zealots flare briefly into prominence, fade away, and are replaced by new stimuli. Governance and policymaking respond to these daily fluctuations, while slow-moving structural crises largely remain out of sight.
Thus emerges a mediacracy in which perception becomes reality. Yet our institutions are so finely interwoven and our administrative systems so vast and complex that steering by daily incidents drives them toward dysfunction. And still we express surprise when institutions disintegrate and organisations grind to a halt. Governance driven by incidents allows structural problems to continue developing invisibly.
11. The Discovery of Not-Knowing and the Erosion of Science
Yuval Noah Harari offers a counter-intuitive but illuminating observation in Sapiens: with the discovery of science, humanity discovered not-knowing. Not long ago, religious traditions such as Islam, Christianity, or Buddhism served as the sources of all knowledge. Everything worth knowing about the world was known to omniscient gods or great sages and conveyed to mortals through scriptures or priestly interpretation. This sufficed.
The discovery of not-knowing enabled tremendous progress, but also introduced a fundamental uncertainty. At the same time, science cannot answer questions of meaning. In political and societal debates, however, it is increasingly invoked as a supplier of definitive truths. Phrases such as the science is settled seek to close debate and grant science an absolutist authority foreign to its nature.
Not-knowing is not a deficiency of science, but its greatest achievement. Scientific knowledge is inherently provisional, contextual, and corrigible. The problem lies not within science itself, but in society’s and politics’ treatment of it. In a culture that demands manageability, control, and predictability, science is forced to provide certainties it cannot, in principle, deliver. It is not science that becomes dogmatic, but its societal function.
Chapter V – Societal Consequences – When Phenomena Reinforce One Another
In a society increasingly governed by complexity, it becomes difficult to distinguish clearly between cause and effect, or to determine where transitions begin and end. What follows is an attempt to translate the phenomena described above into their societal consequences.
12. Communication Regression
The developments described profoundly affect how people communicate with one another. Social media are characterised by three features: brevity, speed, and ubiquity. Context is lacking, depth scarcely possible, and messages circulate without distance or reflection.
This combination leads to persistent overstimulation. Individuals are exposed in real time to an information bombardment that is difficult to process. Scale and velocity ensure that not the rational, but the instinctual aspects of the human psyche are addressed. Images prevail over text, headlines over analysis, emotion over deliberation.
Psychologically, this can be interpreted as regression: a retreat to an earlier stage of consciousness in which primary impulses dominate. Sexuality and security, desire and fear become the prevailing registers. The calm, reflective tone that once characterised public discourse has yielded to impulsivity and outrage.
13. Polarisation
The coarsening of the social climate is often described in terms of polarisation. In response, citizens are encouraged to communicate differently: to listen better, count to ten, allow one another to speak. This approach presupposes that polarisation is a behavioural problem solvable through behavioural instruction.
Yet polarisation cannot be understood as individual deviation. It is a structural consequence of fragmented meaning, the attention economy, and the scale of modern communication. In an ocean of opinions, one must speak ever louder, faster, and more extremely to be heard. Attention generates counter-attention; every position provokes its opposite.
Polarisation is therefore not a moral failure, but an energetic principle. As centrifugal forces in a vortex drive poles apart, so societal positions increasingly diverge—not because individuals intend it, but because the system functions this way.
14. Media as Mainstream
The etymological origin of the word media lies in the Latin neuter plural of medium, derived from medius, meaning “middle” or “in-between.” At its core, the term denotes the channel that mediates between sender and receiver.
For this reason, media have traditionally regarded themselves as neutral carriers of information: observers standing outside the order they critically follow. In a stable societal landscape, this stance was sustainable. In a context-less, accelerated, and commercialised information environment, it increasingly is not.
Media themselves lose their footing amid an excess of perspectives and interests. To remain relevant, they align with dominant narratives that still offer some measure of coherence and impact. Thus arises what is commonly termed “mainstream media”—not as a conscious power grab, but as a strategy of survival.
Media have not so much become the established order as identified themselves with what, in a chaotic reality, still functions as reality: power. The loss of independence should therefore not be dismissed merely as moral failure, but recognised as a symptom of the same dynamics media are meant to describe.
15. The Erosion of Politics
If any institution suffers acutely under these dynamics, it is politics. An overabundance of soundbites and clickbait produces chaos, while nearly every framework for stable and nuanced interpretation is absent. This inevitably results in fragmentation, extremism, and polarisation, both within parliaments and governments. In many Western democracies this is visible: stalemates and stagnation on one side, boundary-transgressing governance on the other.
Within this dynamic, politicians and parties must shout ever louder and adopt increasingly extreme positions to be noticed. With each election, fragmentation grows, while older, more nuanced positions are exchanged for sharper ones. This further amplifies disorder. Politics is consequently viewed with increasing scepticism, trust declines, and electoral upheavals become recurrent.
This erosion proves difficult to grasp due to the constitutional principle of the primacy of politics—the monopoly of the parliamentary system to define the common good. Politics reflects upon all aspects of society as the highest worldly authority, yet rarely reflects fundamentally upon itself.
As a result, societal legitimacy erodes, concealed by appeals to formal legitimacy. Politics continues to seek majorities, while failing to recognise that it, too, is subject to societal development—one might speak of a primacy of consciousness development. This blind spot raises an unsettling question: who protects society from the blind spots of the political collective?
Chapter VI – Synthesis – Truth and Ambivalence
16. From Absolute Truth to Ego-Trut
Until recently, conceptions of truth were shaped by God. Divine truth was absolute and interpreted on humanity’s behalf by religious or cultural authorities. The group provided shelter, yet this shelter increasingly came to be experienced as constraint.
With the awakening of the individual, emancipation from the group occurred. This granted access to not-knowing, to the relativisation of knowledge exemplified by science. Yet precisely because this not-knowing was unsettling, the individual projected divine truth onto the self. Cogito, ergo sum, declared Descartes. Thus ego-truth acquired absolute status.
Modernity thereby generated intrinsic ambivalence. Individually, it manifests as tension between not-knowing and the ego’s claim to absoluteness. Collectively, it appears as a divide between realities of poverty, violence, environmental degradation, and exhaustion, and the human pretension that the world is manageable and redeemable.
The shift from divine truth to ego-truth constitutes the psychological precondition of disinformation.
17. The Inner Conflict of Modernity
Modernity thus bears a fundamental ambivalence. Individually, it consists of the tension between awareness of not-knowing and the need for certainty and recognition. Collectively, it appears as a contradiction between lived reality and the belief in control and mastery.
Modern consciousness inhabits this tension without tolerating it. Not-knowing is acknowledged, but not endured. Provisionality is professed, but not accepted. A constant impulse emerges to neutralise uncertainty through conviction, assertiveness, and moral claims.
18. Disinformation as an Inevitable Consequence
Within this ambivalence, disinformation appears not as anomaly, but as logical outcome. Where individual perspectives are absolutised and shared frames of reference absent, every message becomes inevitably subjective. In such a context, virtually all information is potentially fake—not because of intent to deceive, but because the conditions for shared meaning are lacking.
Disinformation is not a rupture with modernity, but its expression. It is the reverse side of decades of individual liberation, technological development, and ego absolutisation. The question is not how to eradicate it, but how to live with it in a world where truth no longer speaks for itself.
Chapter VII – Moralism as Regression
19. Disinformation as a Disease of Prosperity
Disinformation and fake news are autonomous symptoms of modernity. Only in societies where meaning and structure are profoundly fragmented and the individual elevates personal perspective to norm can disinformation assume such scale and intensity. In this sense, it is not deviation, but product of prosperity, technological advancement, and individual emancipation.
The extent to which this constellation would affect all dimensions of society—manners, institutions, architecture, technology, law, and politics—was scarcely imaginable decades ago. Modernity has opened Pandora’s box. This does not render disinformation harmless, but intelligible.
Moral labelling implies clarity about truth and falsehood and authority over judgement. The established order and its fact-checkers appear as custodians of objective truth, while dissenting voices are cast as ignorant or malicious.
20. Morality as Reversion
When modernity can no longer bear its own consequences, it reverts to morality. Where manageability fails, moral judgement enters. This judgement appeals to obedience, exclusion, and discipline, marking a regressive movement—a return to a consciousness in which truth was absolute and deviation dangerous.
With this regression, familiar patterns reappear. Terms such as settled science or there is no alternative claim final truth. Opinions are excluded, censored, or morally condemned. Images acquire the force of public tribunals, while collective fear and aggression intensify.
Moralising disinformation thus functions as a canary in the coal mine, signalling that modern consciousness has reached an impasse and can no longer tolerate its own uncertainty.
Chapter VIII – The Symptom Recognised
21. Hotpants as Metaphor
Earlier periods of societal change display similar reactions. The emergence of hotpants in the 1960s and 1970s provoked fierce moral outrage. Wearers were frequently denounced as immoral or provocative. In retrospect, hotpants were not the cause of social disruption, but a symptom of deeper developments: individualisation and female emancipation.
Moral resistance did not halt the underlying movement. Emancipation advanced; moralism faded. The expression changed, the development endured.
Likewise, disinformation is today treated as the cause of societal breakdown. Yet here too it is an expression, not the source. Those who combat the symptom without understanding the underlying dynamic risk reproducing precisely what they claim to oppose.
Chapter IX – Conclusion – An Open Question
22. Living with Uncertainty
Two dominant strategies currently prevail in addressing disinformation. One is the technocratic logic of manageability, seeking rules, systems, and interventions to control the phenomenon—at the risk of increasing restriction and eroding fundamental freedoms.
The other emerges when manageability fails: society turns to morality. What cannot be controlled is condemned. Experience suggests that this path leads not to insight, but to hardening.
Disinformation is a manifestation of post-modernity, arising from decades of individual liberation and technological development. The question is not whether this is desirable, but whether we are willing to recognise disinformation as a product of the world we ourselves have created. Perhaps the truth lies not in combating disinformation, but in understanding what it reveals about our consciousness, our institutions, and our relationship with uncertainty.