Political-legal manipulation as the basis for the governance of society in the era of post-truth

A wide variety of political and legal means are used to govern modern social processes. Increasingly, however, political and legal mechanisms need to be analyzed through the prism of manipulating public opinion, people's demands and interests, their expectations and moods. Manipulative technologies are actively infiltrating various areas, starting to play an increasingly important role in public and municipal governance, international relations and geopolitics. Proceeding from the obvious fact of inseparable unity of legal and political instruments used at different levels of authority and governance, political and legal manipulation should be understood as a way of influencing public relations by political and legal means, which constitute a desire to change people's perceptions or behavior through covert, deceptive or violent tactics or strategies. Political-legal manipulation comes to the foreground when overt domination is impossible, reprehensible, or simply undesirable for a certain period of time. Concern for the rights, freedoms, legitimate interests and possibilities of self-fulfillment of the objects of governance, as well as political opponents makes it necessary to resort to implicit, "veiled" management tactics, which, for the most part, are manipulative technologies. Authorities are actively using law-making, law enforcement and law interpreting means when implementing political and legal manipulation, legal instruments are becoming increasingly politicized, dependent on political will and the discretion of individuals. The desire to create a favorable image of authority, the desire not so much to solve the problem, but to use the needs of the population to implement the prepared development scenarios leads to the fact that the boundaries between right and wrong, truth or lies are gradually disappearing. As a result, the term "post-truth" is becoming more common on the pages of both o political and legal research papers. Post-truth can be defined as a certain set of circumstances in which objective facts are less significant for shaping public opinion than the appeals to emotions and personal beliefs. This regularity has led to the emergence of a new form of public governance - post-truth policies, the subjects of which do not only actively use "pseudo-truth" but also carry out an unprecedented wide scale political-legal manipulation on the basis of distortion of real facts. The spread of post-truth politics has far-reaching consequences: it distorts not only the real political situation both within states and internationally, but also changes the very attitude of society to law and politics.

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