Helen Razer

Bernard Keane

Recently, overwhelming mutual despair at the faltering quality of public debate and the apparent death of logic and reason has driven writers Helen Razer and Bernard Keane to the desperate act of befriending each other. Over many long rants against the state of the world and the way people write about it, govern it and behave in it, they decided that Never Have Things Been So Bad. To remedy (or at least assuage) the current ubiquity of Stupid they decided that a book describing its nature and inexorable rise must be written. What is Stupid? Stupid is the rejection of the discomfort of intellectual rigour in favour of the mentally comfortable and convenient. Razer and Keane skewer everything that has made them want to shoot the TV lately: climate change denial, vaccination denial, fanaticism, paternalism, moral panic, New Ageism, the War on Terror, conspiracy theories, the internet, the mental health industry, conspicuous compassion, postmodernism and the cult of 'I'. A Short History of Stupid is angry, funny, savage, smart, provocative, infuriating and incendiary. It has echoes of de Botton in that it is conversant with the history of thought, but it is a lot more disrespectful. It is as rude and as inflammatory as O'Rourke and as penetrating and unforgiving as Hitchens. It is funny, but it is also at once a provocation and a comfort for those with like minds. Above all, it will inspire debate, reassure the terminally frustrated and outrage the righteously Stupid. It is a book whose time has definitely come.

The decline of reason and why public debate makes us want to scream

A Short History of Stupid

'A powerful and occasionally polemical appeal to reason in politics; if you're despairing in search of an antidote to the poison of "alternative facts", here's your book. Like any good political text, there's something here to offend everyone. You'll want to cheer, high-five and occasionally shout your disagreement, but what you won't want to do is put it down.' Former Senator Scott Ludlam A tide of populism and xenophobia is sweeping the western world. Disillusioned voters are turning to political outsiders and increasingly rejecting the liberal economic solutions of out-of-touch elites. Despite having access to more information than at any time in human history, we are turning our backs on experts, evidence and facts themselves in a new Era of Electronic Ignorance. Many warn darkly of a repeat of the chaos, misery and war of the 1930s. How did it all go so wrong? The Mess We're In explains how a perfect storm of historical developments has left us fearing that a Dark Age is fast approaching. How the triumphant economic philosophy of neoliberalism has failed us and provoked a backlash that is sweeping it aside. How the internet is rewiring our economies, our media, our culture and even our own brains. How politics has become a hollowed-out industry of self-interest rather than a public service. And how, together, they've unleashed a wave of anger and fear that has engulfed the world. But don't panic, says Bernard Keane: things are also better than they seem to be. In this fascinating, entertaining and occasionally maddening book, he points to how we can fix things - and also how Australia can lead the way.

How Our Politics Went to Hell and Dragged Us with It

The Mess We're In

Lies and Falsehoods: The Morrison Government and The New Culture of Deceit by well-known political journalist Bernard Keane combines Crikey's eye-opening dossier of Scott Morrison's documented lies with Keane's insightful take on why deceivers dominate in the new era of politics. This book is the first in The Crikey Read series by Crikey and Hardie Grant Books. All politicians lie. They twist the truth, exaggerate and spin. But blatant lying has now become a standard part of political discourse, led by Donald Trump and carried on by Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison. Combine this with an all-out assault on the truth in public debate along with the biggest communications revolution since the printing press, and you have a disaster in real time: a sea of fake news, hyper-partisanship and polarisation. No society or democracy can function without trust, and the consequences of this profound shift are clear. The first step to a remedy is in understanding both the liars and the environments in which they lie. Lies and Falsehoods does exactly that, in this highly readable and incisive account of how we found ourselves in this fractured post-truth world, and how we might get out. From Crikey and Hardie Grant Books, The Crikey Read is a series that brings an unflinching and truly independent eye to the issues of the day in Australia and the world.

Bernard Keane

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