Opinion Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: Does the collapse of sincerity mark the end of our capacity to make a common world?

Another set of diagnoses is political. Polarisation is often blamed on echo chambers, algorithmic filtering, and our tendency to seek comfort in virtual communities of the like-minded rather than engage with difference. Yet, the evidence is contested. It is not clear that people are actually unaware of opposing views; tribalism may drive our communication choices as much as our communication choices drive tribalism.

A final set of diagnoses is cultural — the rise of identity-based expression and the shift from sincerity to authenticity. Whereas sincerity grounds speech in self-knowledge and inner conviction aimed at a shared truth, authenticity takes fidelity to one’s own self as an end in itself. The purpose of communication is no longer the creation of common ground; it is a display of oneself. The instrumentalisation of speech — for profit, tribe, or self — corrodes sincerity.

These concerns have been around for a long time. But the new institutional order intensifies them. Philosophers have long understood that sincerity is inseparable from communication. As undergraduates, we learned from thinkers like Paul Grice and Ramchandra Gandhi that sincerity is not merely a moral or cultural ideal; it is a necessary condition for any shared world of meaning. More recently, Bernard Williams has argued that accuracy and sincerity are constitutive of regimes of truth. The collapse of sincerity, the n, is not just the collapse of trust; it is the collapse of communication, and even the possibility of truth itself.

But is the challenge perhaps even deeper? The problem with sincerity is that it is not merely an inner mental state; it must be a legible social practice, a form of life. Yet, something in the contemporary structure of the world renders sincerity unreadable. We simply cannot attribute it to anyone. We are constantly suspicious that it is being performed rather than lived. Some of this has to do with the ethics of speech: The more irony, snark, or performative wit become dominant modes of expression, the harder it is to ascribe sincerity.

Then there is the problem of what we might call borrowed words. All our words are, in some sense, borrowed. But when one reads statements from institutions, corporations, or politicians — and, I must confess, even some declamations on behalf of social justice or historical redress — one wonders whether these are genuine expressions or borrowed scripts.

Recently, at a conference, a distinguished social-media scientist proposed using AI to make online communication more “polite”. Imagine a programme that preserves the propositional content of your tweets but softens the tone. Perhaps such filtering could help us communicate better; if a technological tutor assists in restraint, so be it. Yet, this was a reminder that we may soon inhabit a world where none of our words are truly our own. We can label things “AI-generated”, but the line between what is being produced for us and what is ours, in the sense we understand the term, will blur. Whether this leads to the loss of individuality is an open question. But it may well sever the connection between sincerity and communication.

Social theorists like Byung-Chul Han think sincerity has become structurally impossible. If sincerity is a social practice, it requires a shared context to be legible. The “collapse of context” makes sincerity harder to enact: The meaning of any utterance is endlessly recontextualised, and what fixed meaning in one setting becomes ambiguous in another. The norms that once anchored sincerity no longer hold. The forms of life that sustained sincerity have disappeared. The collapse of the public–private distinction, another background condition for sincerity, compounds this loss. When every thought or feeling is displayed, or when the sheer frequency of expression intensifies, sincerity gives way to performance and exhibitionism.

Our political times compound the corrosion. So many votaries — corporations and individuals alike — who once championed causes like climate change or affirmative action are now suddenly against them. There may be good reasons for changing one’s mind, and many will change back when the political winds shift again. But it leaves us wondering: Which set of beliefs was sincere?

One of the less discussed reasons for the loss of sincerity is what we might call salience mismatch. We often worry about misinformation or motivated belief. But a glance at social-media conflicts suggests something subtler. What leads us to think others are insincere is not that they are misinformed, but that what matters to them does not align with what matters to us. The atrocity, the injustice, the outrage that consumes me may not move you. But because you do not share my hierarchy of salience, I take you to be morally insincere. “Whataboutery” is often simply this salience mismatch at work. The result is that no one can sincerely profess to fight injustice as such; each of us appears to fight for our own tribe. Perhaps tribalism is the only sincerity left to us.

So, a deep question of our time may be whether the collapse of sincerity marks not just the end of communication, but the end of our capacity to make a common world. We might think we are being sincere, but the point is that it cannot be enacted as a social practice. Some of the answers to this problem will be structural: Insulating communication from the logic of profit or power. Perhaps the function of leadership is to reinstate sincerity as a norm, not enact the exhibitionism or bulls**t that corrodes it. Others think it will require a new ethical attunement, some degree of withdrawal, reinstating the distinction between public and private. But for the time being, we inhabit a world where we experience a sense of vertigo when we have to attribute sincerity. There is so much communication, and yet the world feels so silent.

The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express