Sometimes that vacuum is filled by religiosity ideologies du jour, or fashionable, custom-made cults, which are often appealing because they purportedly provide answers for every question. In effect, they provide Cliffs Notes and catechisms that serve, however ineffectively, as road maps from womb to tomb. The leaders and the members of those groups never worry that such simplistic answers often breed intolerance, extremism, and fanaticism, sometimes accompanied by the mind-set that "God would be on their side if only he knew all the facts."
...Those of us who have read both George Orwell's classic, 1984, and Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon still recall the shock of how seemingly easy it was, in 1984, for facts and information to be denied and, in Darkness at Noon, for fiction to replace fact. In reading those books we understood that a masterful manipulation of reality was taking place. But in this age of info-glut, it is possible to see how in the "real world" we all inhabit we could easily be subjected to the same kind of deceptions, perhaps not even by the deliberate manipulation of facts, but by being inundated with information from governments, corporations, political parties, and "smart" individuals -- so much information that it's impossible to sift through it all. That's why we have an obligation to learn, to be able to analyze, dissect, and understand the implications and the impact of information, of technology, and of science.