Reality Is A Shared Hallucination.

Sometimes it means an outright falsehood told in order to deceive
people and advance the agenda of the liar. Or it can be a “lie of omission,”
in which the crucial part of the story that we’re not being told is
more important than the parts we know. Sometimes the lie can be
something untrue that the speaker thinks is true, otherwise known as
misinformation (as opposed to disinformation, which is something
untrue that the speaker knows is untrue). In yet other cases, particular
erroneous beliefs are so universal—serial killers are always men,
the Founding Fathers cared about the masses—that you can’t pinpoint
certain speakers in order to ascertain their motives; it’s just
something that everyone “knows.” Sometimes, in fact, the lie might
be the outmoded dominant paradigm in a certain field. Arelated type
of lie—a “meta-lie,” perhaps—occurs when certain institutions arrogantly
assume that they have all the answers. These institutions then
try to manipulate us with a swarm of smaller individual lies.
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Such cases of positive proof are in the minority, though. Basically, the
pieces in this book show that the received wisdom—the common
knowledge—is often wrong. Well, then, what’s right? That’s a much,
much more complicated question, and the answers are elusive.
Hopefully we’ll all spend our lives pursuing them. But the first step is
to realize that the “answers” that are being handed to us on a silver
platter—or, perhaps more often, shoved down our throats—are
often incorrect, incomplete, and usually serve the interests of the
people promoting those so-called answers. That’s where You Are
Being Lied To comes in.

-Russ Kick
(on Chomsky - Disinformation Guide)