We live in an era of illusion – and delusion

Matt Hancock, a government minister, has felt obliged to declare formally, ‘Objective reality exists.’ To his credit, he confessed to a certain shamefacedness about this but he added that he believes he had a duty to reassure us.

I find it hard to understand what Mr Hancock’s statement means. By ‘objective reality’ does he mean truth? If so, then the proposition ‘There is such a thing as truth’ is self-evident – a necessary proposition – because if someone attempts to refute it and says, ‘There is no such thing as truth,’ then either that proposition is true or the one who states it is wrong. In either case, there is something that is true.

Actually, Mr Hancock’s laudable and public-spirited aim is to reassure us that in our new world of virtual reality, filled as it is with fake news, Bitcoins, the dissembling worlds of Facebook and Twitter and computer games of such startling verisimilitude that so called ‘real life’ pales by comparison, there yet remains something real, something we can trust.