I’ve had a number of people ask me where I get my news. Unless you’re slavishly devoted to one particular channel, which generally means a devotion to one particular viewpoint, there’s no clear answer. More and more news outlets are charging subscriptions for online content, and we don’t have cable television (nor would I want to watch the news—it seems so inefficient). We don’t get the local paper. I’m often hunting for news sources, rooting for the rare middle-of-the-road news source.
I get news and contemporary ideas from Substack, from writers who have formed “tribes” or communities of people. But even this often comes with a subscription, and I’m not always sure what to choose.
The question of “where do you get your news?” isn’t just about your political viewpoint. More and more, it’s a question of how do you understand what’s real?
Existential mimesis. It’s a term that defines our age, but you probably don’t—and shouldn’t—use it in casual conversation. You’ll sound pretentious. By existential mimesis, I’m referring to two influential schools of philosophy in the 20th century: the existentialism of Sartre and Camus (and others), and the mimesis of Rene Girard.
In many ways, the two terms are at odds, like the color blackish-white. Existentialism is the realization that we must forge our own meaning by our choices. To push this further, even reality isn’t given to us—we must “live our truth” and choose our reality (perhaps, in part, by choosing which news to consume). We seek authenticity. Personal choice is more important than tradition. This may sound familiar in modern life.
Yet, the dizziness of this freedom can overwhelm us at points.
Don’t misunderstand me, we’re not true existentialists. Rather, we experience a communal existentialism: meaning is not handed to us, so we look to how those near us are making it. Our truth lives in our networks. Communities. We imitate others. This is Girard’s mimesis. He writes of how we imitate each other’s desires. I would add that we imitate all the way down, to our understanding of truth itself.
Existentialism says we’re free to choose. Mimesis says our desires are borrowed.
Existentialism says we must be authentic. Mimesis says we have a model we’re imitating.
Existentialism says we create meaning. Mimesis says we copy meaning.
And both are true.
We are trapped between radical freedom and radical imitation. No wonder that we experience a culture of anxiety: we want to both freely choose and fit in. And this goes for not only what we desire, but what and how we believe.
We feel the anxious pressure of defining ourselves and the exhaustion of chasing what others validate. And when this gets played out into beliefs and ways of knowing, we see tribes that watch FoxNews or MSNBC. We see that belief in something like religion is about desire as much as it is about truth. We see in politics the rise and need for narratives of feeling.
The narratives we believe often strike to this existential core: we copy a narrative (mimesis) because it speaks less to what is true and more to how we feel (existentialism). Thus, when a politician comes along and speaks about outrage—and we already feel anxious and angry—whatever he says is true because it speaks to what we’re experiencing. It doesn’t matter if it’s rooted in reality. It’s our communal reality.
Where do you get your news?
These narratives of feeling point to a deeper truth: how we know is changing. Or, our epistemologies are shifting. How we know is based less on the academy and less on science (which has its own crisis of replicating studies) than previously. We’re deeply suspicious of technology and its narrative of progress (it doesn’t, after all, match how we feel). We increasingly base knowledge on things like feelings, personalities, and desires.
Knowledge needs to match feeling, and if it’s fed by an entertaining personality with an easy-to-understand narrative, all the better. And the tension we feel about not just the best way forward but actually what is true is symptomatic of epistemological collapse. Old ways of knowing are going out.
Thus, we need new ways of knowing. And we can see the battle between what’s coming next played out in the headlines. Specifically, we have two popular ways forward, and a harder middle way.
Option 1: Epistemic Fragmentation
Reality becomes increasingly group-based as people retreat into their own tribes and subcultures. Truth becomes more about identity (there’s that existential ideal) than about inquiry. We cannot have a national discourse and, eventually, lose our shared norms. This is already happening in a number of ways.
Option 2: Neo-Authority Structures
Where we have no epistemic authority, we’ll create new ones. Religion is on the rise among Gen Z. Politically, we see democracies like Hungary or India who have chosen media control and new authority. A charismatic leader and crisis mentality contribute to these structures. We see desires for this in the headlines.
Option 3: Epistemic Virtue
Conscious knowing comes from humility, from engagement with nuance and complexity, from communal discernment. Signs of this would include disillusionment with technology (and the rise of new technologies we control), local communal action, and the desire for depth over noise.
Yet, any virtues will grow out of collapse. They will take time to see.
And at last we reach it: why read fiction? Naturally, at this juncture, it’s not just fiction we need. We need conscious knowing—ways of engaging with others and our world that are slow, that offer nuance and complexity, that reveal our inner lives, how our desires drive us, and the hollowness of our rivalries.
We don’t need more data but more interpretation.
We need wisdom over facts.
Ultimately, our epistemological crisis is a crisis of being: we are anxiously looking for what is meaningful, what is real, what we can live and enact.
Fiction, and a return to the humanities, speaks to these things. It slows us down. It muddies the motivations of characters, offering complexity over simplicity. It touches on our inner lives and ways we deceive ourselves. It cultivates long stretches where we sit with another person—even an imagined person—and grasp the world from another view.
Fiction isn’t the only tool for the next epistemic age: spirituality will need to be present, limits around technology, communal discourse—but it’s a crucial tool. In an age of anxiety, fiction points to how humans have undergone crisis and found ways forward.
I know friends who don’t read much fiction because there aren’t clear applications or takeaways. While true—no one is telling you to take this one thing away—the lack of clarity is part of the point. Life has no clear applications. We must navigate its labyrinthine ways. It seems rather than an instruction manual, we could use a story.
Read fiction because it’s a tool as we go through epistemic collapse. Read it in old forms like paper books and engage in new forms—Substack, audiobooks, podcasts. We need all of it. We need narratives of feeling that meet us where we are and, exercising our feelings, take us somewhere new, somewhere where our knowledge is come by slowly, and humbly, and alongside others.
Fiction, in other words, may not always tell us what is real, but it will help us get at what is true.