There was no landslide. The protagonists of rightwing populism would have us believe that their side emerged from recent elections and referendums with an overwhelming share of the vote. But in reality their successes were less clear-cut. The Brexit vote that took the world by surprise was very close: only 51.8% of those who went to the polls voted to leave. Meanwhile, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took the Turkish presidency with just 51.4% of the vote and Donald Trump won the US electoral college – and thus the presidency – with just 46.1%, whereas his adversary scored 48.2%. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland party behaves as though it were a huge movement “reclaiming” its people, even though more than 87% of German voters chose other parties.

When I was invited to guest edit and design the 64th edition of the Jahresring, an annual German collection of essays on a theme from art history or philosophy, I immediately knew I wanted to focus on “the backfire effect” – a phenomenon first described and analysed in 2006 by the American political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler. Essentially, people who are entirely convinced by a statement, regardless of how incorrect it might be, cannot be persuaded to change their minds by facts to the contrary. Such evidence only reinforces their belief in the fallacy.

We have known for some time that there are people who feel drawn to esoteric conspiracy theories. What is new, however, is that hard facts are no longer believed by wide segments of the population. During the past two years, I have come to realise that if 30% of the electorate are resistant to rational argument, we are on a slippery slope. In light of all this, I wanted to investigate why the backfire effect is having more impact today than it did 10, 20 or 40 years ago. What has changed? What is different? This latter phrase became the title of the book.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fluid borders … a spread from What Is Different? Photograph: Wolfgang Tillmans

What Is Different? is part text book, part art book. It has fluid borders and not everything is presented in a conventional manner. Some texts are printed as scans or photocopies because I am interested in how language looks, how newsprint looks and how research looks. For example, a neurological paper on MRI scans is almost impossible to understand for the lay reader, but I have reprinted it in full. The book is interspersed with my own photographs, which give pointers of shifts in perception, be it portraits during last year’s total solar eclipse in the US or effects of photographic lenses in distorting light.

In 2005, I exhibited an installation entitled Truth Study Centre at Maureen Paley’s gallery in London. I was driven by the realisation that many global problems have resulted from false proclamations of absolute truths: the then South African health minister denying that HIV is the cause of Aids, or the fundamentalist righteous claims by Islamists, whose propaganda I would read on stickers posted around London, or the claim that Saddam Hussein had access to weapons of mass destruction.

For my installation, I set out photocopies of erroneous information, juxtaposed with political texts written with great analytical clarity, along with absurdities, humour and photographs of religious and everyday situations. Scientific newspaper articles and illustrations from astronomy were recurring elements – in particular the Nasa Kepler telescope, which was to search outer space for Earth-like planets.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Where does this leave religion? … the section dealing with our search for Earth-like planets. Photograph: Wolfgang Tillmans

I was fascinated by the following thought: if it really is possible to prove the existence of a huge number of Earth-like planets, and so demonstrate the strong possibility of extraterrestrial life, then religious leaders on Earth would no longer be able to hold on to their anthropocentric view of God. We would then need to come to terms with a new humility, just as in Copernicus’s day, when he showed that the Sun, rather than the Earth, was at the centre of the known universe – correcting the prevailing worldview and ushering in the modern age.

Around 2010, it transpired that there was indeed a multitude of Earth-like exoplanets. This discovery was widely reported in the media, but it didn’t result in a tempering of religious zeal.

All of this laid the groundwork for developing and editing What Is Different? In interviews with people ranging from cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky to German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel, from Berlin-based anti-rightwing extremism activist Bianca Klose to Financial Times editor Lionel Barber, a complex picture emerges with recurring observations.

The fragmentation of societies has caused a longing for cohesion ripe for exploitation by rightwing populists and nationalists. Maybe most surprising to me was the role of social isolation which, Lewandowsky says, makes the internet such a powerful tool for post-truth, since adherents of fringe ideas can imagine themselves as part of a huge movement when online: “The vast discrepancy between the actual prevalence of a belief and what these people think others are thinking makes their belief resistant to change.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Juxtapositions … protesters in New York, 2014. Photograph: Wolfgang Tillmans

I was also interested in the question of how political views and emotions are intertwined with, and indeed traceable to, neurological activity. Jonas Kaplan, Sarah Gimbel and Sam Harris show just that in their paper Neural Correlates of Maintaining One’s Political Beliefs in the Face of Counterevidence, which I reprinted in the book. Using MRI scans, they demonstrated how political and non-political statements result in different neural activity: beliefs that form our political identity are much harder to shift than those not linked with identity.

In his essay The Power of Political Emotions, philosopher Philipp Hübl describes the processes of left- or rightwing camp formation and polarisation through seemingly non-political feelings such as disgust, or aversion of impurity. The contributions toWhat Is Different? reveal the importance of feelings in politics, something that is rarely acknowledged.

Given the emotional resistance to change hardwired into the brain, how can zealots be argued away from their positions? The German author and journalist Carolin Emcke told me: “The most promising tools against fanatics are those that bring something ironic, ambivalent or hybrid into play. These are forms that dogmatists tend to find uncanny. Whoever wants to protect a democratic, open society should try to get their own views across with a certain confidence, joy and pleasure.”

Working on the book confirmed my suspicion that the populist revolts of 2016–17 were less a movement started by globalisation’s losers and more a result of the manipulation of those groups for reactionary and capitalist purposes. Harnessing the anger of those left behind by neoliberalism, the goals of Trump and hard Brexiters are clear: more deregulation of the economy while embedding an authoritarian, patriarchal and nationalist vision into society.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An election tracker and Trump supporter in New York, 2016. Photograph: Wolfgang Tillmans

I think the problem is the frustration of a particular segment of the elites: The Jacob Rees-Moggs, the Alexander Gaulands – individuals who consider themselves predestined to lead, but who in pluralist societies feel that they have been deprived of their authority to interpret the world. The feeling that they are no longer being listened to triggers in them an urge to attack the current system in its entirety, including its institutions: the EU, the press, public service broadcasters and so forth.

As Lewandowsky says about the billionaires supporting rightwing populism: “Theirs are very personal motives and probably not the motives these people will admit to themselves. There are very few people who say, ‘I’m greedy and I like being greedy.’ Instead they will say, ‘I’m a libertarian and I believe that society is best served if free individuals pursue their own interests.’”

I’ve met a lot of people with a wide variety of political views. Despite our differing opinions, I am able to hold interesting conversations with the majority, since we all share some common ground. Occasionally, though, I encounter authoritarian, patriarchal nationalists. They are uninterested in finding solutions and stick doggedly to the same rhetorical questions about the system. They are unpleasant characters of our times, more isolated than they are popular.

There are obvious similarities between rightwing populists, Islamists and other religious fundamentalists. Typically men, they are all motivated by authority, patriarchy, and purity of nation or faith. They sabotage multicultural coexistence in order to convince us that it is impossible for different people to live peacefully together. It is our responsibility to highlight the fact that multicultural communities have existed for centuries (from Sasanian Persia to medieval Spain), that they continue to exist in many places, and that we intend to preserve and strengthen them.

In 1990, I photographed the side of a building in Kreuzberg, close to old the route of the Berlin Wall. Someone had written this in graffiti: “The border doesn’t run between peoples but between top and bottom.” A slogan that back then came across as somewhat outdated and Marxist now appears acutely relevant. Twenty-five years ago it could not have been predicted that the fruits borne by the end of communism, flourishing world trade, and the deregulated capitalism of the 1990s would not be distributed equally. Today the world is considerably richer. Millions of people in emerging economies are escaping poverty – yet inequality, both real and perceived, is growing.

I hope the book raises such uncomfortable questions as: What do I not want to learn about myself? What do I not want to know? The quest to find our own blind spots should never stop.