As long as there has been language there has been lying, perhaps longer.
- Poisonless animals are able to mimic the behavior of other animals that are poisonous and others have fake eye spots on their wings.
- “Don’t worry I’m not going to hurt you” has been spoken for milennia by the guy who in fact is going to hurt you.
- “There is no such organization as the Mafia” has been announced by the Mafia in New York City for decades.
- Tyrants have lied and said they were great, immortal, divine,ever-victorious as long as there have been tyrants.
- In the United States academic racists said African-Americans were biologically fit for slavery.
- Scientific misogynists said women were by nature hysterical and loony prudes in white robes have argued masturbation leads to insanity.
The power to tell the truth logically carries with it the power to lie.
To say otherwise is naive.
Worse, it is disorienting, and therefore paralyzing. If truth itself has now morphed into something weird and strange and incomprehensible then how on Earth would one go back to the days of truth?
Lying, as old as the hills, needs to be fought back with the same kind of weapons that have fought all the other kinds of malicious behavior that are equally sempiternal: violence, fraud, backstabbing. Law, accountability, impartial questions, justice. And so on.
Don’t freak out.
Eric Linus Kaplan 
I think if you’re going to critique it, it should be that it’s not so much post truth as being post handful of groups disseminating what those groups think is the truth. I think a quote goes along the lines of there used to be about two newspapers that everyone, regardless of what extreme they were on, would read.
Now no matter how extreme you are, you can always find somewhere on the net to tell you you are right and to not listen to anyone else outside their clique, as everyone else are liars/out to get you. A cult for every claim, no matter how mad. Someone on the net tells you you’re potentially wrong? Tell them they are patronizing and then tweak your search algorithms to find a group who knows just how right you are!
I think every man is his own cult anyway. If you think you’re right you always have someone to agree with you: yourself.
Yeah, but that’s just one person agreeing with you!
I might be naive to think this, but I think exposure to a number of others who disagree could help change the mind of someone or mollify their position (though this has it’s yang result as well – where the person is factually correct but keeps running into factually incorrect people and they start to doubt the fact for the sheer number of disagreements (which is argument ad populum, of course, but that’s human nature))
Anyway, I’m sure there’s a group out there that will agree the post truth claim is a naive one! Just a quick search and ta-da! >:)
Clusters of belief with zero doubt/dissenting views amongst them.
In our Courts of Law……. Whatever happened to “The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth?