Minds and Nation at Risk from Truthiness Fever
/EINPresswire.com/ On Tuesday, May 24, 2011, Booklocker.com releases the highly-anticipated Truthiness Fever by professor, serial entrepreneur and author Rick Hayes-Roth. A scholarly but action-oriented assessment of the widespread epidemic of lying and propaganda throughout America, TRUTHINESS FEVER focuses on truth, beliefs that best match empirical evidence. Truth contrasts with truthiness, beliefs supported primarily by emotions and feelings. When political satirist Steven Colbert celebrated the rise of "truthiness," he called attention to an important pathology in our body politic. Over the past decade, it has become increasingly common and acceptable for public figures to boost whatever beliefs they feel will help their cause. Nowadays children mostly consume misleading and harmful information. We are poisoning their information environment as dangerously as sugary foods ruin nutrition and toxins pollute air, water, and soil.
Throughout American society today, cynicism is rampant. This book investigates the origins and increasing trends that make Americans distrustful. How can a complex society, operating in the age of information and globalism, even survive let alone prosper when its citizens don't believe most of the information they get? How did we get here, and are we destined to auger in?
Societies sometimes organize to regulate or eliminate pollutants. Lead and mercury were used for centuries before they were largely outlawed. Over the last few decades, we began to limit smog-producing gases, acid-rain components, and asthma-inducing particulates in our air. Recently the entire world has been struggling with the fact that rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide lead to higher global temperatures that kill forests, wipe out glaciers, and inundate low-lying islands and coastal areas. These problems, and others, can't be solved unless our people understand the issues and wrestle with options. That requires operating on truth, not truthiness. However, society's most powerful players are addicted to lying and foment truthiness fever purposefully.
Colbert highlighted a broad class of lying. Truthiness is a "truth" that a person claims to know intuitively "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, or intellectual examination of facts. By allowing truthiness to trump truthfulness, we cede our right to intelligent debate and decision-making. The most powerful, emotional, resonant voices prevail in all contests when facts don't matter.
This book seeks to amplify Colbert's observation to address the apparent plague of lying, a state of Truthiness Fever, where most people are either busy polluting the information environment or suffering the consequences of daily involuntary ingestion of propaganda substituting for facts. In a world where billions of people ingest the same information, manufactured by a small number of self-interested lawless polluters, we risk a global plague. This plague causes vast numbers of people to take inappropriate actions based on toxic beliefs. If we don't clean up the environment, we can expect powerful interests to further manipulate and control the citizenry, and for increasingly cynical people to tune out information, becoming Homo non-sapiens.
... Full Press Release here: /PRAvenueNW/ --
http://www.pravenue.com/newsletter.asp?article=5047
TRUTHINESS FEVER will appear shortly in all on-line and retail booksellers and will be available immediately in hardback as well as eBook formats. The full title of the book is TRUTHINESS FEVER: How Lies and Propaganda are Poisoning Us and a Ten-Step Program for Recovery.
Rick Hayes-Roth is a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School as well as Chairman & CEO of Truth Seal Corp., a nonprofit charitable organization that operates www.TruthSeal.org. Truth Seal's mission is to validate public statements, make the statements and their authors trustworthy, and help create a competitive marketplace that rewards truth telling.
Journalists and editorial reviewers may obtain a free eBook for review by sending a request including their name, publication or affiliation, and email address to ReviewCopyRequest TruthinessFever com. The book website http://truthinessfever.com provides information about the book, an excerpt, table of contents, and index, as well as related news postings.
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Throughout American society today, cynicism is rampant. This book investigates the origins and increasing trends that make Americans distrustful. How can a complex society, operating in the age of information and globalism, even survive let alone prosper when its citizens don't believe most of the information they get? How did we get here, and are we destined to auger in?
Societies sometimes organize to regulate or eliminate pollutants. Lead and mercury were used for centuries before they were largely outlawed. Over the last few decades, we began to limit smog-producing gases, acid-rain components, and asthma-inducing particulates in our air. Recently the entire world has been struggling with the fact that rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide lead to higher global temperatures that kill forests, wipe out glaciers, and inundate low-lying islands and coastal areas. These problems, and others, can't be solved unless our people understand the issues and wrestle with options. That requires operating on truth, not truthiness. However, society's most powerful players are addicted to lying and foment truthiness fever purposefully.
Colbert highlighted a broad class of lying. Truthiness is a "truth" that a person claims to know intuitively "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, or intellectual examination of facts. By allowing truthiness to trump truthfulness, we cede our right to intelligent debate and decision-making. The most powerful, emotional, resonant voices prevail in all contests when facts don't matter.
This book seeks to amplify Colbert's observation to address the apparent plague of lying, a state of Truthiness Fever, where most people are either busy polluting the information environment or suffering the consequences of daily involuntary ingestion of propaganda substituting for facts. In a world where billions of people ingest the same information, manufactured by a small number of self-interested lawless polluters, we risk a global plague. This plague causes vast numbers of people to take inappropriate actions based on toxic beliefs. If we don't clean up the environment, we can expect powerful interests to further manipulate and control the citizenry, and for increasingly cynical people to tune out information, becoming Homo non-sapiens.
... Full Press Release here: /PRAvenueNW/ --
http://www.pravenue.com/newsletter.asp?article=5047
TRUTHINESS FEVER will appear shortly in all on-line and retail booksellers and will be available immediately in hardback as well as eBook formats. The full title of the book is TRUTHINESS FEVER: How Lies and Propaganda are Poisoning Us and a Ten-Step Program for Recovery.
Rick Hayes-Roth is a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School as well as Chairman & CEO of Truth Seal Corp., a nonprofit charitable organization that operates www.TruthSeal.org. Truth Seal's mission is to validate public statements, make the statements and their authors trustworthy, and help create a competitive marketplace that rewards truth telling.
Journalists and editorial reviewers may obtain a free eBook for review by sending a request including their name, publication or affiliation, and email address to ReviewCopyRequest
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