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Clement, Hume, Paine and Huxley were all talking about religion. But much of what they wrote has more general applications - for example to the pervasive background importunings of our commercial civilization: there is a class of aspirin commercials in which actors pretending to be doctors reveal the competing product to have only so much of the painkilling ingredient that doctors recommend most - they don’t tell you what the mysterious ingredient is. Whereas their product has a dramatically larger amount (1.2 to 2 times more per tablet). So buy their product. But why not just take two of the competing tablets? Or consider the analgesic that works better than the ‘regular-strength’ product of the competition. Why not then take the ‘extra-strength’ competitive product? And of course they do not tell us of the more than a thousand deaths each year in the United States from the use of aspirin, or the apparent 5,000 annual cases of kidney failure from the use of acetaminophen, of which the best-selling brand is Tylenol. (This, however, may represent a case of correlation without causation.) Or who cares which breakfast cereal has more vitamins when we can take a vitamin pill with breakfast? Likewise, why should it matter whether an antacid contains calcium if the calcium is for nutrition and irrelevant for gastritis? Commercial culture is full of similar misdirections and evasions at the expense of the consumer. You’re not supposed to ask. Don’t think. Buy.

Paid product endorsements, especially by real or purported experts, constitute a steady rainfall of deception. They betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers. They introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectivity. Today there are even commercials in which real scientists, some of considerable distinction, shill for corporations. They teach that scientists too will lie for money. As Tom Paine warned, inuring us to lies lays the groundwork for many other evils.

I have in front of me as I write the programme of one of the annual Whole Life Expos, New Age expositions held in San Francisco. Typically, tens of thousands of people attend. Highly questionable experts tout highly questionable products. Here are some of the presentations: ‘How Trapped Blood Proteins Produce Pain and Suffering’. ‘Crystals, Are They Talismans or Stones?’ (I have an opinion myself.) It continues: ‘As a crystal focuses sound and light waves for radio and television’ - this is a vapid misunderstanding of how radio and television work - ‘so may it amplify spiritual vibrations for the attuned human’. Or here’s one: ‘Return of the Goddess, a Presentational Ritual’. Another: ‘Synchronicity, the Recognition Experience’. That one is given by ‘Brother Charles’. Or, on the next page, ‘You, Saint-Germain, and Healing Through the Violet Flame’. It goes on and on, with plenty of ads about ‘opportunities’ - running the short gamut from the dubious to the spurious - that are available at the Whole Life Expo.

Distraught cancer victims make pilgrimages to the Philippines, where ‘psychic surgeons’, having palmed bits of chicken liver or goat heart, pretend to reach into the patient’s innards and withdraw the diseased tissue, which is then triumphantly displayed. Leaders of western democracies regularly consult astrologers and mystics before making decisions of state. Under public pressure for results, police with an unsolved murder or a missing body on their hands consult ESP ‘experts’ (who never guess better than expected by common sense, but the police, the ESPers say, keep calling). A clairvoyance gap with adversary nations is announced, and the Central Intelligence Agency, under Congressional prodding, spends tax money to find out whether submarines in the ocean depths can be located by thinking hard at them. A ‘psychic’, using pendulums over maps and dowsing rods in airplanes, purports to find new mineral deposits; an Australian mining company pays him top dollars up front, none of it returnable in the event