The Age of Deception

The world is not as it appears.

Items that matter least become front-page headline news, while things that urgently impact your life barely get a mention.

We live in a society where information abounds:  Radio and television, the Internet, satellite communications, and all manner of religions and ‘-isms’.  However, the Information Age does not equal the Age of Truth.  Increasing information does not necessarily mean increasing truth.

Today’s society is not led by a zeal for truth but rather by powerful economic and socio-political forces bent on maintaining the status quo.

Those in power want to remain there and those economically powerful want to remain so.

The sheer inertia of a belief system can hold it in place for centuries, even if it is wrong.  History is, in fact, simply a junkyard of discarded “truths”, “truths” that held minds captive for centuries, even millennia, and for which the blood of millions has been spilled.

Economic, political, egocentric truth-molding forces are at work with vigor, even in science and medicine. Today, more than ever, ideas compete for money and power more than truth.

As a result, we live in a period where many of our most important beliefs are simply wrong.

The Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, helped develop and promote the beliefs that the Aryan race was superior to other races, that Hitler was Germany’s savior, and that the Jews caused all of Germany’s economic problems.  Depending on which account you believe, millions of people lost their lives before Hitler and Goebbels were toppled and the threat to world stability ended. Goebbels said:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

This site represents a collection of lies told often enough to eventually become truth.  It’s time to unlearn these lies, starting right here, right now.

Where would you like to start?

Health
Politics
Religion
Love & Sexuality

John Shirley

“Are we being lied to, why, and by whom?”

Can we blame Big Business and Government for lying to us—when lying is integral to our culture?

First thing in the morning, find in the mailbox envelopes consciously designed to look like utility bills or cheques: Tear them open and find that they’re advertisements, junk mail. They lied.

Turn on the television, commercials tell us a product makes us younger, more attractive: It’s a famous old lie, yet that’s the point: We accept it.

We accept ads for “psychic hotlines” that take advantage of stupid people, though everyone but that stupid person knows that these are con artists. We know that government-sponsored TV ads lie about how buying a state-lottery ticket will change your life. But we accept the lie.

Many years ago, as an executive assistant in a New York City public relations firm, I was startled when PR press releases I’d typed up for the local papers were reprinted almost verbatim. The articles, in many instances, were giddy reports on the wonders of new drugs, diets, and health “systems,” with no mention of possible contraindications. When I questioned this, I was fired.

The same thing happens in our newspapers every day: PR is published as news….We accept that political TV ads lie—we shrug it off. Recently here in California the pharmaceutical industry ran a TV ad “warning” people that legislation making it possible to buy cheaper prescription drugs from, say, Canada would endanger them: They implied the drugs would be impure. Drugs from Canada? Impure? The ad was ripely deceptive.

But it’s okay, it’s permitted. That’s our culture. We’re a culture of liars. It extends to everything we do so naturally our acceptance of lies is perfected in government.

John Shirley was once described by William Gibson as “Cyberpunks’ Patient Zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent.” He was the original script-writer of The Crow (1994). He is author of the radical, prophetic cyberpunk trilogy Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra and Eclipse Corona (Northbridge, CA: Babbage Press, 2000).

Mark Amerika

“Are we being lied to, why, and by whom?”

Of course, I feel like I’m being lied to all the time by 3M—the Multinational Military Media mouthpiece that I wrote about in my first novel, The Kafka Chronicles, a story that partly dealt with the Big Lies being broadcast during the Gulf War. It’s such a strange sensation, being glued to the tube as a kind of willing media victim, a casualty of the propaganda wars, quite literally allowing all of that top-down disinformation to enter my bloodstream like a language virus gone out of control.

Lying is an art form. Take it from me, a fiction writer (i.e. one who manipulates language to try and re-tell the Truth so that the word actually has meaning again). At one point in my novel, in a section called “Our & We,” the narrator says:

“Language: ultimate strategy: get the lingo: then turn on the jingo spectacle: turn on the vid: then ransack the id.”

In those glory days of a kindler, gentler nation reaching out to an orgasmic convergence of a thousand points of light, there was nothing but the promise of a lackluster Vision Thing—and endless news polls telling us that “we” actually wanted to be lied to, that “we” preferred it that way.

Again, from The Kafka Chronicles:

“We be the ones: we be the ones who die for them: who them?: turn on the t.v. and find out: they ain’t ashamed to show their face: they got us support: they say we: they say ours: they say us: we deliver
on command.”

Mark Amerika is one of America’s most important and acclaimed experimental novelists. He is publisher of the Alt-X Network, described by Publishers Weekly as “the publishing model of the future.” His novels include The Kafka Chronicles: A Novel ( Tallahassee, FL: FC2, 1993) and Sexual Blood (Tallahassee, FL: FC2/Black Ice Books, 1995).

Don Webb

“Are we being lied to, why, and by whom?”

Lies are the koine, the common tongue of the world. I know the counter person at the copy store is lying about having done my order—so I lie about when I brought it in.

What a small thing. Yet, here is how it works. Ten million small rain drops fill up a pond. The people that are looking for the big lies from Big Brother or whoever, miss the point, they are looking at waves and thinking that’s what’s keeping them from seeing the Real. (A little Chaos Theory might help here.) It’s the whole pond, and none of us even cares that we are filling it.

When I wrote this note back to Alex Burns I started to tell him I that I had misfiled the e-mail so it was late. Well, one less drop for today.

Don Webb is an award-winning author of over 200 short stories and articles. His novels include The Double: An Investigation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) and Essential Salts (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). In another life, he was contributing editor for FringeWare Review.

Catherine Austin Fitts

“Are we being lied to, why, and by whom?”

“Popsicle Lies”

The Popsicle Index is the % of people in a community who believe a child can leave their home, go to the nearest place to buy a popsicle, and come home alone safely.

When I was a child, the Popsicle Index was 100%, the Dow Jones Index was around 500, and debt per person was almost nothing. Today, the Popsicle Index is reaching new lows, the Dow Jones is reaching new highs, and debt per person just went over $100,000 in the US.

I used to work at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development <www.hud.gov>. HUD’s deeper mission was to shift control of community resources to outsiders. It made the Dow Jones go up.

We lied about what we were doing. We lied to ourselves, each other, the press, the people. Every effort was made to make sure information was not integrated, accessible. We were lost in a mapless world. Data at HUD was like cigarettes in a prison.

When I left, I started a company that helped Web users make money maps—graphic-like comic books of how all the money worked where they lived. The money map tool, Community Wizard, was destroyed when the Department of Justice and HUD targeted and destroyed the company and seized our digital systems and databases.

Catherine Austin Fitts is president of Solari, a progressive investment advisory company. She was formerly Assistant Secretary of State for Housing and Urban Development under President George Bush from 1989 to 1990.