The thing that rankles so much about being lied to is that for a moment (or for eternity) you are trapped in someone else's reality.
The Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Social Security Crisis, and the No Child Left Behind Act are how we know that we're living in George W. Bush's reality. Apparently, a majority of the country is also living in a world full of lies and apparently a majority of the country believes those lies. And this makes us a nation of slaves. Because you are not free to act and make choices and be a true citizen if you have no real information and no real choices.
Because waking up one day and realizing that you've been lied to is about one of the worst feelings around, many victims of lies will invest in the lies themselves and continue believing as long as possible.
My theory is that many people are afraid of freedom and this sometimes transfers to a fear of the truth. When confronted with opposing versions of reality, why not pick the most comfortable? Why not pick the one that'll make it easy to sleep at night? Who really wants to be responsible anyways?
It is a tragic irony that the grand old party, the party of Lincoln, the party of personal responsibility is selling a pack of lies to the American people and enslaving them for generations.
To paraphrase the sex pistols-- There's no future in America's dreaming.
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Lying is a national pastime. Women lie about wanting children (or not). Boys lie about how many girls they do or don't have on the hook. Most of all we lie to ourselves--and thus, per your formulation, we all live in a false reality. If we cannot escape our own self-imposed reality, isn't truth a chimera? Is truth so rare it never even made it onto the metaphysical endangered species list, instead being consigned directly to the compendia of extinct ideas, albeit in footnote form?
Please ressurect this this thread--and I recommend that everyone read Erich Fromm's "Escape from Freedom"
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