My hardening perspective against the mass media and official information

"The official story" is always wrong, and also fundamentally misleading*. 

And it probably always has been - albeit getting worse and worse, more and more rapidly, about more and more things.

So that here-and-now the wrong and misleading nature of public knowledge must be kept in mind, much of the time.  

This is because the official story is currently generated and sustained by people whose net-motivations are always (increasingly) bad and whose nature is always dishonest: i.e. the people who run things, the ruling class, the leadership class of all the major institutions (including churches).

Therefore; I know what is Not true; but very seldom know what is true; and there is really no way of me finding-out what is true -- except in a few areas where I have personal knowledge or contacts; and except when it comes to knowledge in very general (not detailed) terms. 

However, this little is also sufficient for my purposes. 

What I do not know, is not essential (not least because I could not do anything constructive about it) - and what I need to know, it is possible for me to know. 

*Of course there are always some elements of true knowledge used in the construction of every effective deception, manipulation, and lie. We must not be misled by this: it is merely a rhetorical necessity. 

+++

(In theory I have known this for a long time; but in practice I always made exceptions where I was actually believing, and being-shaped-by, too-detailed-to-be-real knowledge that was in fact attained wholly secondhand. And I still do make such false exceptions, unfortunately; although eventually (sometimes) I catch myself; and realize I have been fooling-myself and/or been-manipulated yet again. This happens because nature abhors a vacuum, and on any given topic we must positively-believe some-thing - so we had better be clear about what it is that we are assuming, and our grounds for it.)