Post-truth and fake news. Fashion or condition?

This article addresses the question of post-truth and fake news. It is intended to ask whether it is a question of intellectual fashion or rather a question of the human condition. It is argued that post-truth not only affects the mass media, but the human species as such. It is rather an anthropological issue than a journalistic one. In fact, we humans are specifically characterized by our ability to create, believe and spread fictions. In this sense, the human species would be a fake species. It is not that we are nowadays experiencing the phenomenon of post-truth, but that we humans have always lived in the age of post-truth: we are the post-truth species. This means reviewing the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric, assuming that rhetoric is central to thought, and then consider what we call "reality" as a kind of shared fiction, a "successful fantasy". Consequently, the discussion about post-truth would have to be focused in another way, no longer dualistic. There would be then no ontological distinction, be it either strong or profound, but discursive instead, fictitious or artificial, fake, between truth and post-truth. And that is what happens, par excellence, in the network of the digital world, where the real has finally become a fable.