Enjoyed cognitive dissonance very much indeed. Thank you.

Orwell saw the dangers of misinformation first hand when he worked for the BBC (41–43) to produce propaganda during the war, and knew only too well of what he wrote.

And that was almost 80 years ago.

How much more sophisticated have the ‘forces that wish to divide us’ become since then and even since the movie ‘Wag the Dog” circa 1997?

Wasn’t too much after that movie that 9–11 and the Iraqi and Afghanistan invasions occurred and more than a ‘flurry’ if not a ‘super-storm’ of disinformation and outright prevarication swept away critical analysis and fostered even more cognitive dissonance: we’ve been attacked (and not by Iraq and certainly not by Afghanistan) and must ‘cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war.’

There has been so much more sophisticated obfuscation in this digital age since then that a dangerous charlatan is now in the White House.

Much of this age was also presaged by Neil Postman in his “Amusing ourselves to Death” and even earlier by Kurt Vonnegut in his chilling short story ‘Harrison Bergeron’.

Distraction as entertainment has indeed shortened our attention spans to such a degree that we can’t even remember the last lie let alone comprehend the current one.