At any time in history there is the narrative that you are supposed to believe and then there are the conspiracy stories. The problem with the truth is that the

At any time in history there is the narrative that you are supposed to believe and then there are the conspiracy stories. The problem with the truth is that there are vested interests in running the official narrative as well as the conspiracies. Therefore truth has a problem, it can only flow onto a page to be hopefully found by a future generation. If it sneaked out into broad daylight it would be cowardly dismissed by all as a conspiracy story. Thucydides wrote with this feeling in mind. He did not write for the here and now of his time, instead he wrote for eternity. He could not care less if nobody read his work, he knew that truth mattered more than the opinions of others no matter how important those people might think they are. If we look at the contribution to history made by Edward Snowden, is he a loser? I am sure he has lost a lot of relationships with people that see him as a traitor or those that sought to apprehend him. I am sure that the people he meets now don't see him as himself but who they want to see, some type of freedom fighting hero. So he has probably lost a lot in not being able to live the normal life. Financially too, so you could say that he is a loser. But he told the truth when nobody around him would. He fought back the fear and was prepared to accept consequences for the greater good. Through his deeds and thinking he escaped the narrative about the world that we are all led to believe. He almost certainly learned a lot about the truth along the way. Therefore, in my universe, those that don't have first-hand direct experience of 'the truth' are the real losers, including those that go along with whatever we are told about Syria and other wars fought for resources around the world. I would say that those that believe Western Propaganda excessively have lost their minds. What is a worse thing to lose? Edward Snowden certainly has not lost his mind, the vast majority of people actually have by this metric. Our leaders are true slaves to the lies, even knowing the truth about some of the tales they have told. These people write history and have ghost writers and others that help them project their version of reality. But historians are connoisseurs and prefer genuine fact based history so the fake history written by our leaders cannot last forever, particularly if an alternative truth based narrative exists.