Free to be Human - Intellectual Self-Defence in an Age of Illusions

Free to be Human - Intellectual Self-Defence in an Age of Illusions

Product ID: 11639

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Author: David Edwards
Publisher: Viveka Foundation
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 244
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8188251127

Description

This is a book about freedom, and above all, about the idea that there is often no greater obstacle to freedom than the assumption that it has already been fully attained. While in the West few individuals today suffer physical restraint by the state, we are still constrained by powerful psychological chains, which are in many ways far more effective.

Free to be Human shows how the same filter system distorts our understanding of many personal, ethical and spiritual issues, ensuring that we remain passive, conformist, confused, uniformed and willing to accept the irrational values of corporate consumerism. David Edwards argues that, in order to counter this continual process of disinformation and disempowerment, we need to master the art of intellectual self-defence and so become able to challenge the deceptions of a system that subordinates people and planet to the drive for profit.

Influential writes such as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have shown that the corporately controlled mass media of western democracies serves as a gianst filter system favouring powerful state and business interests: what we receive as objective news about domestic politics, human rights and environmental issues, is in fact, an extremely partial and biased view of the world.

REVIEWS

A wise and acute analysis of the way our minds are controlled.
-Howard Zinn, activist and historian

One of the most challenging and thought-provoking books I’ve read in a long time.
-James Wilsdon, Third World First

It’s a hard message, with few punches pulled…By implacably redirecting our attention time after time to the framing conditions that regulate our lives, the illusory nature of most contemporary reform processes is powerfully exposed.
-Jonathon Porritt

Contents

Foreword by Jonathon Porritt

New Preface by David Edwards

Introduction

Beyong Totalitarianism: Noam Chomsky and the Propaganda Model of Media Control

Extending the Scope of the propaganda Model

Killing the Dream of Religious truth

Killing the Dream of Religious truth

Killing the Dream of Right Conduct

The Desolated Day-Tripper

Beyond Success-Tolstoys’ Confession

The Wound Outside

Joining the Two Wounds: Personalizing the Global, Globalizing the Personal

A Chest of Tools for Intellectual Sefl-Defence

References

Bibliography

Index