Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
You Are Being Lied To was the first book that I created (edited or wrote) for The Disinformation Company. You Are Being Lied To was the first book that the Disinformation Company published. Our collaboration led to eight more books. Here we are years later, circling back to the beginning, closing the loop with a new edition of our maiden effort.
In 1998, I sent a copy of my second book, Psychotropedia: Publications From the Periphery , to Disinformation, hoping for a review, possibly an interviews. Instead, I was hired to write for their website,. (In those heady days of the dot-com bubble, it was actually possible to get paid for online writing,.)
When I first talked to Disinformations founders, they mentioned that at some point they were hoping to publish books, CDs, and DVDs. In early 2000, I reminded them of this, asking if theyd like to hear some book ideas Id been percolating. They said yes, so I sent a proposal for a series of anthologies. Big anthologies. Huge. In an oversized format stuffed with at least twice as much material as a regular softcover.
Some of the anthologies, especially the early ones, would have a wide focus; the thread running through the articles would be that they questioned the status quo in some way, exposing lies, challenging cherished beliefs, toppling idols. They could focus on politics, current events, the media, law, history, science, religion, business... any field was fertile ground for questioning. (Later anthologies would focus on a single theme, like religion, sex, or history. Some of those have been published; others are in the pipeline; still others have a more nebulous future.)
Speculation was to be kept to a bare minimum, if not banished altogether. Sure, speculation is important, even vital, but theres a time and a place for it, and these anthologiesespecially the unthemed oneswerent it. I wanted facts, documented facts. What Id discovered through my years of reading and research was that enough cold, hard, inconvenient facts were being ignored to easily fill volumes. Thats what I set out to do.
As soon as I was told to get cracking on the first anthology, a title popped into my head, fully formed: You Are Being Lied To . Titles tend to come to me either early and in their final form, or not at all. I loved this one from the moment of its immaculate conception.
Id been reading and reviewing non-mainstream, nonfiction books since my university days. My book-fetishism, my attraction to uncommon knowledge, and my distrust of authority melded in one explosive moment when I bought a copy of the Amok Fourth Dispatch , a monstrous compendium of subversive books. Soon I was reviewing such books for the free-speech magazine Gauntlet and the legendary Factsheet 5. Not content to just scratch the surface of the world of hidden knowledge and the books that revealed it, I wrote two books Outposts and Psycofropedia containing a total of 1,800+ short book reviews. My personal library of 3,000 volumes (and rapidly growing) clogged up my home.
So by the time You Are Being Lied To was being hatched, I already knew a bunch of potential contributors I wanted to approach, topics I wanted to cover, and specific pieces I wanted to include. A call for submissions went out; lots of acceptances came back. To my delight, even the big namesNoam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Sydney Schanberg, and Riane Eisler among themwere climbing aboard. Most of Disinformations regular crew submitted. I tapped acquaintances and colleagues, approached strangers, got directed to colleagues of colleagues. New subjects opened up, fascinating articles rolled in. Not everyone I approached wanted to take partsome didnt even respondbut more than enough did to fill a hulking volume.
Nor was everyone optimistic about the book. At the time, Disinformation was owned by Razorfish, a Web/new-media development/marketing/advertising/consulting/leveraging thingy of the type that was springing up like mushrooms during the dot-com boom. Razorfishs CEO bet Disinformations president, Gary Baddeley, that You Are Being Lied To would flop. Savor that. The head of your publishers parent company literally makes a personal wager that your book is going to be a failure. Gary, taking the bet, told me this at the time, and I assured him that the CEO was wrong,. Not only did I believe this, I knew it. The time was right for a book like this.
Sure enough, with no marketing or advertising (or reviews), You Are Being Lied To found its audience, radiating outward in larger and larger circles as readers (and bookstore workers) discovered it and told other people about it. In what was a bold and unusual move at the time, Disinformation sent a PDF copy of the book to everyone who ordered a physical copy. This was in 2001, way before the Web 2.0 made social networking and interactivity so easy and prevalent. No MySpace, no YouTube, no wikis...and virtually no effort on our part, either. Gary collected on his bet.
I edited two more unthemed volumes in the same vein: Everything You Know Is Wrong (another rousing success) and Abuse Your Illusions (not so much). After that, I wrote three books50 Things Youre Not Supposed To Know , its sequel, and The Disinformation Book of Lists then started in on the hot-button-themed anthologies, one on sex, the next on religion.
Then I got sick. Really sick. I wont bore you with the details, but the upshots are 1) if youre ever living or working (or both, as I was) in a building infested with toxic mold, leave permanently the second you discover the fungal cause of your mysterious health problems, and 2) Im damn lucky be alive.
Being in such a bad state, and then slowly recovering, meant that even though a fourth You Are Being Lied To-style anthology seemed like a good idea, I was too busy staving off the Grim Reaper to handle it. After seven years, sales of You Are Being Lied To had slowed, so Gary suggested a revised edition, obviously a much smaller project than creating a new collection from scratch. But this was still too much for me to handle, so Gary planned to put out an edition that would be lightly updated by the Disinformation staff. As I got better, I would be free to help as much as I wanted to. It was pretty late in the process before I was well enough to play a significant role, which kept expanding as the deadline bore down on us.
Originally, there was to be a smattering of new articles in this volume, but because of my insatiable need to stuff more more more into every anthology, around half of this edition is comprised of material that wasnt in the original. (And eleven of the pieces making a second appearance have been updated by their authors.)
At this point, I could say something about how the need to question the status quo is at least as urgent as its ever been (and its always been urgent), but, well, I could also tell you that the sky is blue. Id rather not state the obvious. And if youve bought, or at least picked up, this book, and if youve read this much of my self-indulgent intro, then chances are you already realize that there are so many fundamental and interlocking problems with the way things are donepoiiticaiiy, economically, legally, militarily, environmentally, educationally, socially, sexually, ethically, spiritually, scientifically, and so onthat its a wonder the world keeps going at all, that society after society doesnt crumble and send us back to the hunter-gatherer stage. Its all held together by duct tape, inertia, and wishful thinking (or blind denial, if you prefer).
