Symbols and deception, and the social murder of identity Book

This book is about the fascinating phenomenon of misperception of reality and how this leads to loss of identity. Our habit of understanding the world via generic meanings associated with the symbolic appearance of everything around us subtly seduces our sense of judgement into oblivion, separating us from ourselves; we lose our identities. But this is not natural to human ways of life. Economic, political, social, and cultural systems and processes in society are what set this intriguing process in motion--a process that profoundly affects our personal lives, as well as our institutions and the larger society we confront every day. Freedom and genuine, humanistic democracy is the simple condition that will desymbolize social interactions and processes. And there would be no need to misperceive reality. The book is written for the general intellectual public; yet, it is also a theoretical work. It is written in a nonesoteric and nontechnical language; it avoids the "academic privatization" of knowledge. The book blends psychology, economics, politics, philosophy, and sociology into a unified approach for making sense of our lives. The ultimacy of human dignity and happiness is what guides the analysis and method of the book.