Political actions influence our well-being continously and deeply and because they harm us in many instances, perhaps more often than they help us. Comforting illusions that protect us against despair and protect the status quo against effective protests are readily created and disseminated. The illusions are normally believed because it would be hard to live without them.

Recent history reaffirms the illusions. They are partly a legacy of the nineteenth century, with its dramatic industrial revolution and its high-minded revolutions in France and in America acclaiming individual liberty and political independence.

But the twentieth century, with its world wars, genocides, and other horrors, has been marked by regression rather than progress. The illusions are a fundamental instance of symbolic politics; they build an impression of beneficial social change even while typically erasing the possibility of change.

The obstacles to change are both obvious and subtle. They include the influences exerted by public and private authorities, by public opinion, by the media of mass communication, by leading institutions, by language, by warped analysis of social conditions, and by images. A book that examines these issues therefore cannot be optimistic, but it can be realistic.