a World Without Truth

Veni, vidi… and I understood!?

The claim that knowledge is shaped by power did not begin on social media, nor in corporate diversity programs. It has a philosophical origin. What we are witnessing today is the downstream effect of an idea that has quietly redefined what it means to say something is true.

You may not recognize his name. But you are already speaking his language.

Every time someone argues that truth is a social construction, that science reflects power, that merit conceals privilege, or that language creates reality, they are echoing — often without knowing it — Michel Foucault. This is not coincidence. It is inheritance. We are living inside a conceptual architecture he helped build. And like most architectures of power, it is most effective when it remains invisible.

Foucault identified something important: power can shape knowledge. Institutions are not neutral. Language carries force. None of this is controversial. It is precisely why his work became so influential. But influence often comes not from what is correct, but from what is extended beyond its limits.

From the observation that power influences knowledge, a stronger claim emerges: that knowledge itself is inseparable from power. At that point, the ground shifts. Science is no longer a method for discovering reality, but a mechanism for imposing frameworks. Justice is no longer an attempt at fairness, but a system for reproducing hierarchies. Merit is no longer a measure of competence, but a mask for privilege.

Truth, in this view, does not disappear. It becomes suspect by default.

And once that happens, something else takes its place.

Within this framework, disagreement does not challenge the system — it feeds it. Any defense of objectivity is read as an attempt to preserve power. Any appeal to merit exposes hidden advantage. Any criticism is reinterpreted as evidence of complicity. The system does not refute objections. It absorbs them.

That is not intellectual openness. It is conceptual closure.

Roger Scruton recognized early the emergence of such self-sealing systems. Jürgen Habermas identified the contradiction at their core: one cannot deny the possibility of truth while making claims that demand to be accepted as valid. Karl Popper warned long ago that theories that cannot be falsified cease to belong to rational inquiry. And even Jacques Derrida, often associated with similar currents, demonstrated that Foucault’s framework was not beyond challenge.

The point is not that these thinkers agree. It is that the problem has been visible for a long time.

There are also traditions that moved in the opposite direction. The Argentine philosopher Osvaldo Guariglia, working within discourse ethics, argued that the fact that knowledge emerges in social contexts does not reduce it to power. Language, in his view, is not only a tool of domination. It is also the space where claims are justified, challenged, and — sometimes — validated. It is where reasons are given, not merely imposed.

That distinction matters. Because if even a minimal form of rational justification is possible, then the reduction of all knowledge to power cannot be sustained. It becomes not a diagnosis, but a position.

Yet the most serious flaw in Foucault’s framework is not external. It is internal.

If all knowledge is an expression of power, then that statement is itself an expression of power. If all truth is constructed, then that claim is also constructed. The framework collapses into a dilemma: either it is merely one more attempt to assert a perspective, or it is making a claim that is meant to be true. It cannot coherently be both.

This is not a rhetorical trap. It is a structural failure.

And it leads to a question that is rarely answered directly: if every claim to truth is an exercise of power, why should any particular claim be accepted as true rather than recognized as an attempt to exercise power?

At that point, something becomes clear. The framework does not eliminate power. It removes the criteria that might limit it.

This is why its influence extends far beyond philosophy. It shapes how identity is understood in the work of Judith Butler, how inequality is analyzed through concepts such as intersectionality developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, and how language itself becomes a primary battleground. If discourse creates reality, then controlling discourse becomes a central form of power.

This is not an accident. It is the logical conclusion.

The issue, then, is not that Foucault was entirely wrong. It is that a valid insight — that power can shape knowledge — was expanded into a total explanation. And in that expansion, the distinction between truth and power was progressively erased.

Foucault did not destroy truth. He destabilized it.

And when truth is destabilized, power does not disappear. It becomes the only stable reference point.

If this tension is so evident, the more uncomfortable question is not philosophical, but institutional. Why did a framework that dissolves the idea of truth spread so rapidly through universities, cultural institutions, and public discourse? What makes a worldview in which truth is permanently suspect so widely acceptable?

The answer may lie less in the arguments themselves than in the structures that benefit from them.

And that is a question far more unsettling than any theory.