Diamonds are plentiful and now easy to mass produce; we even accept the reality of blood mines. Mainstream news media is by and large lying to us for their owner’s gains, whether that be politically, economically, or culturally. And finally most of the dietary information the government drilled into us about things like the “food pyramid” was wrong from the beginning and we’re again only just accepting that. Just like how we’re finally accepting that eggs and meats are good for you and that maybe the multi-billion dollar food industry selling us delicious bags of pure calories is evil in every respect.
I think "everything we learned is a lie" is also a "lie." The news media seems to be full of people that are very similar to "normal people," like our parents and prior generations, that were and are trying to over-confidently distill certainty from vast and abundant ambiguity, and do so somewhat poorly. It's also amazing how forgiving our societies are, or how readily we escape personal consequences for mild to relatively serious false beliefs, and how slow we are to correct, even in the face of mounting evidence. It sometimes seems that while we may progress in some areas, we regress equally in others, like there's a natural conservation of folly, generation after generation of random walks. Maybe there's something adaptive to gullibility, because it surely hasn't killed off enough to diminish the prevalence. But I agree, every generation seems to confidently crystalize a gestalt of falsehoods, and pass those on to a new generation that are in the midst of over-correcting their own way to a new crystalized gestalt of falsehoods.
news agencies may well be full of real normal people with interests roughly aligned with the common man, but they're owned by strange rich people with interests usually completely at odds with those of the common man. the issue isn't one of accuracy or inaccuracy, or a failure of a valid attempt, it's one varying degrees of success at attempts to do something other than honestly tell you what's happening in the world.
all news agencies larger than a certain size should either be non-profit or publicly-owned
The point is that you only care about discovering these lies when things aren’t going good. When success is effectively trivial, why would anyone act antisocially.
It’s only after we have an obesity epidemic so people start questioning whether our cereals have become candy.
