Werner Herzog Is Ready for the Post-Truth World

In Herzog’s own words, truth is “an uncertain journey … into the unknown, into a vast twilight forest, that gives our lives meaning and purpose,” a pursuit that “distinguishes us from the beasts in the field.” (Unsurprisingly, he is no great admirer of cinema verité, the observational documentary style that he rejects as the “accountant’s truth.”) In the new book he examines various histories, some contemporary, many ancient: the Emperor Nero and his imposters, the origins of the Vatican, the creation of the Potemkin villages, the death of Princess Diana, Enron’s bizarre Hail Mary attempt to create the appearance of “going gangbusters” by building a fake trading floor (complete with banks of phones and computers), the factually dubious but undeniably gripping work of Ryszard Kapuściński, among other examples. To fully articulate his case, he revisits his own work, arguing that manipulation and a bit of deceit in filmmaking are essential to uncovering deeper truth.

Perhaps it’s only natural, then, that artificial intelligence appears to fill him with both dread and a terrible sense of wonder. AI, Herzog writes, “sees its occasional errors, and arrives at strategies and decisions that were not programmed in it by humans,” operating “with a little pinch of chaos and imprecision, as is also embedded in human nature.” Exponential improvements in biochemistry, robotics, quantum physics—AI is coming for all of it. “It can offer us ideas and suggestions that never occurred to us. And more: We are going to experience a reinterpretation of our role in reality, and of the understanding of this reality.” How, then, are we to be in this world?

In Herzog’s eyes, we are far more open to and accommodating of fakery than we might realize. It is as if we’re ready for this brave new world of techno-deception, paradoxically, because our imaginations have been primed for it by the ubiquitous duplicity that surrounds us. Victims of pyramid schemes, aficionados of professional wrestling and opera alike, alleged alien abductees: All have elected, on some level, to participate in their own deception. (Of alleged abductees, he is “gentle”: “The fact that someone claims to have been snatched by aliens doesn’t make it true, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the snatched person is lying either.” )