Two recent events are playing off each other in my mind. First: the Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as the 2016 word of the year, defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Oxford editors noted that in 2016 there was a 2,000% increase in the use of the term, coined in 1992 (by screenwriter Steve Tesich), which they attributed to “the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment.”

Second: the great art educator and critic John Berger died on January 2. Berger’s beautiful book “Ways of Seeing” proposed a new way of looking at and interpreting art in its political and cultural context, and an exploration of the way images work on us, both as fine art and as appropriated by the advertising industry. “The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe,” he says in the opening section of the book. “We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.”

I’m alarmed by the very notion of post-truth. As a writer I have always been sensitive to the integrity of my advocacy, and since even a good cause can be argued dishonestly, I am vigilant about fact-checking and on guard about the ways my personal views could lead me to cherry pick information to support my preferred side of the issue. Then there are the formal fallacies I learned about in high school: ad hominem attacks, begging the question (arguments that simply repeat the premise without offering supporting evidence), false either/or arguments and statements that begin with “everybody knows.” All are signs of a fundamentally weak case that needs bolstering by dishonest means.

In a post-truth universe none of these formal rules and private sensitivities matter. Information is filtered through individual prejudice and self-interest, and conclusions revolve around what people want to believe, just as Berger speaks of advertising that is successful because we judge its truthfulness “not by the real fulfillment of its promises but by the relevance of its fantasies to those of its spectator-buyer.”

There’s a provocative book by Edward Dolnick called “The Forger’s Spell,” which tells the story of an audacious Dutch con artist who sold fake Vermeers during WWII. Dolnick carefully dissects the nature of a great con, noting that the universal ingredients are that the hoax must be timely, topical and something the public wants to believe, and that once a few self-styled experts have endorsed the con, their egos won’t let them expose it.

Contenders for word of the year also included “woke,” African-American vernacular for “alert to injustice in society, especially racism;” and “hygge,” Danish for “a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.”

We are going to need all the hygge we can muster this year, and vision that is clear-eyed, intentional and fully “woke” as we meet the challenges ahead.