Dean Lebaron, venture capitalist and sponsor of the esoteric periodical Complexity Digest offers up a series of videos describing the “The Big Lies” of our day. Dean describes the video series:

I’d been thinking how language is being used to reshape perceptions away from reality, even while it is difficult to do in this age of global news, blogs and new cynicism of authority sources. Government became the most visible example, especially the US administration that prides itself as “staying on message” to teach us to think their way, not necessarily the right way. But civil institutions are at least as guilty, although perhaps not as skillful. Finally I thought of what we learned about propaganda from that master of the art, Goebbels.

Which led to a list of words and phrases designed to pull us away from reality toward someone else’s perceptions. The list grew out of control and could have continued. I stopped not because I was running out of examples, I’m sorry to say, but I wanted to think about something else.

Hope you find the list as instructive as I did, and have your mental guard up…

Highly recommended. Real Media compatible player required.