Witnessing the Dismantlement of a Proven Structure of Belief: The Challenge of Populism and Alternative Facts to Liberal Democracy

Abstract

The crisis liberal democracy is facing today is a new challenge: the relation between alternative factuality and the unleashing of affective impulses is mediated by the transformation of the pre- existing structure of belief. There is an affective turn in the political realm—a realm structurally marked by collective sentiments and their non- relativizable nature. While the structural social and psychic setting of the functional differentiation of society remains unchanged, a crucial component of it has been strongly “affected” by a re-ordering of the function of belief within the cognitive dimension of social communication. In this crucial situation we need a new pedagogy of real-true worldliness to develop cognitive and doxic forms immune to the fakization of any deixis of the world, be it scientific, religious, or customary.