Post-Truth Era and the Moral Responsibility of the Writer
Abstract
The twenty-first century has increasingly been identified as the era of post-truth, in which objective facts have lost their centrality and are often overshadowed by personal beliefs, emotional reactions, and dominant narratives. In such a context, the boundaries between truth and falsehood become blurred, while reality is increasingly shaped by media discourse, digital algorithms, and so-called alternative facts. This paper examines the moral responsibility of the writer within this post-truth condition. It explores the concept of post-truth through the theoretical perspectives of Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreality and Michel Foucault’s regime of truth, while also drawing upon the literary and critical insights of George Orwell, Saadat Hasan Manto, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Mirza Athar Baig, Gopi Chand Narang, and Nasir Abbas Nayyar. The study argues that literature in the post-truth era is not merely a medium of narration, but a vital space for preserving human conscience, ethical awareness, and truth. It contends that the writer’s role extends beyond recording events; rather, the writer must resist propaganda, purify language from ideological distortion, amplify marginalized voices, expose fabricated narratives of power, and safeguard human truth. In this way, the writer emerges as an ethical guardian, an intellectual resistor, and a protector of human dignity in an age of epistemic uncertainty.
Keywords: Post-truth, Moral Responsibility of the Writer, Hyperreality, Regime of Truth, Narrative, Truth, Literature and Ethics, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Urdu Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21802936
