Ebook Free Download | Intellectual Self-defence in an Age of Illusions | Building on the work of writers such as Chomsky and Herman, David Edwards shows how the propaganda system distorts our understanding of political, personal and spiritual issues, ensuring that we remain passive, conformist, confused and uninformed - and willing to accept the irrational values of corporate consumerism. He argues that we need to master the arts of "intellectual self-defence", in order to become able to challenge the "necessary illusions" of a system that subordinates people and planet to the drive for profit. This is the cri de coeur of a young man (he was no more than 33 when the book was published) who has suddenly discovered that the world is utterly corrupt, that most of the things he had been taught at school and university, through reading the newspapers, listening to the radio or watching the television, bear little relationship with reality and are little more than government and corporate propaganda.
He is understandably very angry about it and his book is strongly worded as well as being well written and well documented. It serves well its purpose of justifying his anger, as well as the anger it cannot fail to induce in all but his most unfeeling robotic readers. The book is meant to be about freedom. He uses the term in its conventional sense. A society is free to the extent to which it permits an individual "to choose his or her own paths"; one, in other words, that applies no constraints on its members. This is the way most of our social philosophers, including Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and many others saw it. That is the sort of freedom that the French Revolution sought to create. Such a society, however, can only be totally atomized, one whose members must inevitably suffer from acute social and cultural
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