Before You Choose

Before You Choose opens with a disclaimer that it reproduces nothing literally and opposes no system, and asks the reader to act as a partner in meaning. Across its chapters it examines the illusion of choice, the making of public opinion, invisible power, money and power, guided freedom and democracy as identity, then fear as a tool and the citizen who votes the way a consumer buys. A chapter on delayed truth gathers cases where the facts arrived after the decisions, from the weapons that were never found in Iraq to Watergate, and an appendix adds further real cases such as Brexit. The conclusion says that power is not in one place, that money is not neutral and that truth may arrive late. Its aim, the book says, is to make influence visible, since no book can remove it.