In a world after the truth, justice is not any longer the blindfolded figure standing fiercely over a pair of scales; it is now trying to see through the digital smog of deceptions masked as facts and noise masquerading as knowledge. This reality, that feelings matter more than evidence, that one’s personal conviction can hold more sway than communal truth, happens when that same land of justice is, yes, slippery, but in addition, morphed into something intentionally disordered. It is the conditions that once allowed fairness, the shared realities, the trust in institutions, and the fidelity to reason that are now moving with the relentlessness. The public’s confidence increasingly orphaned from it; fragile ideal; increasingly more necessary than ever.
The post-truth condition is not an unprompted aberration. It is the consequence of structural shifts, the atomization of the public sphere through social media, the commodification of outrage, and the manipulation of truth as a political weapon. As philosopher Hannah Arendt warned, the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced ideologue but the one who no longer knows what to believe. When truth is systematically destabilized, the very grounds for justice collapse. There can be no just verdict without credible evidence, no rule of law without epistemic trust. Hitherto in the post-truth world, the border between fiction and fact is ceaselessly blurred, leaving justice suspended in a space where meaning itself is contested.
This poses an existential challenge. Classically, justice would mean giving to each according to each’s due. Then, what is ‘due’ when the metrics of judgment are skewed by fake news, bias, and tribalism? The Republic presupposed a vision of the good that is shared and a hierarchy of reason in which there is a harmonious ordering of the soul and of the city, harmonious justice, the end of which is that harmony, which Plato called justice. Today, we live in a cacophony of competing narratives, even to the point where we are skeptical of the common good as we are. Pluralism does not mean fragmentation of truth; on the contrary, pluralism leads to cynicism. In such a climate, what becomes performative is justice, avoided like a contagion, another spectacle in the theater of sentiment, appearances over substance, and righteousness a brand.
Legal systems, too, are vulnerable. It was once the courts anchored in practice and precedent, but now it is courts having to deal with deep fakes, viral disinformation, and populist pressure. The idea that the legal trial is immune to the currents of culture wars and identity politics is gone. Caricature a judge as a partisan actor once they are seen as being guardians of constitutional values. Intrinsically, institutional trust exercise is a crisis of legitimacy and a crisis of governance. If people expect the system to be rigged, even an instrument of justice sounds hollow. While in a world where perception takes precedence over reality, the injustice will have the same effect, if not greater, as the injustice itself being felt.
Justice is not dead; it is growing as a way, changing as life does. The issue at hand is whether it is degeneration or renewal. So it may be that the world of post-truth calls for a more explicit and reflexive kind of justice, one that goes beyond requiring procedure to be correct to be epistemically humble. To determine what is right, we must not just ask the question, but how do we arrive at it as a community? In doing so, we might reclaim the lost intimacy between truth and justice, not as absolute constructs, but as shared practices. Justice must once again become a mode of listening, of bearing witness, of reconstructing trust brick by fragile brick.
There is also a paradox at play: the more truth is devalued, the more visible the hunger for justice becomes. Across the world, protest movements have erupted not merely in response to economic or political grievances, but to the perception of truth being denied by states, by elites, and by history itself. The cry for justice is, at its core, a demand that reality be acknowledged, that pain be recognized, and that lies be named. In that cry lies the seed of recovery. Justice, then, may survive not in the purity of institutions but in the persistence of moral imagination, in poets, teachers, whistle-blowers, and citizens who refuse to surrender truth to expedience.
To be just in a post-truth world is not simply to adjudicate fairly. It is to resist despair, to insist on the possibility of understanding, and to affirm the dignity of truth in the face of its erasure. It is to cultivate the courage to doubt even oneself while demanding accountability from power. Justice now must be both act and attitude, a quiet defiance against the flattening of meaning. For even when truth is obscured, its pursuit remains the most radical gesture of hope.
