Despite the volume of reading I try to get in, it is only once or twice a year that I run into something that completely changes my perspective on an important issue of public life then and there. I follow up and check further of course, but there is a certain intuitive sense that one can develop for the kind of things that "everyone knows," which turn out on examination to be Big Lies. The key to the Big Lie is that it is so well accepted as being true that we as humans develop a natural subconscious resistance to challenging it. It must be true because so many people say it! Well, the sad news from thousands of years of human history is that such criteria do not help us know what is actually true. Turn instead to the facts and to reason:
Global Warming? Unstoppable Global Warming by Singer and Avery
Intellectual Property? "Against Intellectual Property" by Kinsella
Democracy? Democracy: The God that Failed by Hoppe
Now the latest big shift for me came through an article on nuclear power.
The article is entitled "Nuclear No-Contest" by James P. Hogan.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/hogan3.1.1.html
I have finally ceased being shocked at the depth of lies that I have absorbed in my lifetime. It is almost a full-time task to uncover them. This article skims yet another layer off of the lie pie we are all handed just by growing up and listening to standard media hype to form our views of reality.
I think it was Stephan Hayes who used a turn of phrase like "learning to distinguish the ring of truth from the thud of falsehood."
Keep reading, and let it ring!