By Edward Curtin ، Amazon Link

Ed Curtin is a revolutionary genius and a profound thinker who sees truth where others close their eyes. Educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology, he teach sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years and he writes as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. He believes a non-committal sociology is an impossibility and therefore see all his work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding. Ed Curtin invites human being to go deep sea diving—beyond the shallows of U.S. political and spiritual life where most researchers and writers paddle, into the dark realms of intelligence operatives, paid killers, and institutions of deception. It is a disturbing journey but a necessary one, and he is a brilliant guide.

Seeking Truth in A Country of Lies is a collection of lyrical and critical essays offering keen insight into a very wide range of topics: from probing analyses related to work, the digital revolution, propaganda, the attacks of September 11, 2001, the CIA, government assassinations and wars, to spellbinding reflections on poetry, nature, time, and even silence. Following in the path of such earlier celebrated essayists as Thoreau and John Berger, Curtin’s critique is at once political, social, cultural, and deeply personal. Constructed over a broad swath of time, these essays address some of the most significant events in world history, shining shafts of brilliant light on abhorrent matters long unspeakable.
The main theme is propaganda and how it is used by the government, the deep state, and the media that is all part of that to justify wars. Curtin brings it from the era of Bernays to the current digital era of communications technology, the latter creating a state of detachment from reality caused partly by the profusion of perspectives, but also largely due to its diversion of the self from the real world it is living through. The digital world is one of “suspended animation”, “historical amnesia and digital dementia”, a “mediated reality”. In essence we are not living authentic lives in a world based on propaganda and the many devices - psychological and physical - that keep us from contemplating the nature of our self, between suffering and joy, nothingness and infinity. “The high tech companies together with the national-security state are grinning with glee at our stupidity.”