
‘Be at the forefront of bearing witness, telling the truth, and pursuing social justice’
By RHEN DAVE RAFAEL
(FULL TEXT: Message of Thanks by Rhen Dave Rafael, UST Faculty of Arts and Letters batch 2022 valedictorian, during the Solemn Investiture on June 11, 2022)
Post-truth. Adjective. A 2016-Oxford Word of the Year “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
It is said that we live in a post-truth world. While this claim is open for debate, one thing is clear: we face an uphill battle against the systemic distortion of the truth.
Seeing how lying becomes normative in our social spaces, it is perhaps easy for us to question the ways of the truth. Yes, it is really frustrating to see how reputable sources of knowledge lose credibility to Tiktok and