(May 13, 2025 at 11:42 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(May 13, 2025 at 5:52 am)Alan V Wrote: What about misinformation and disinformation, or even the lack of information? If you spread propaganda and suppress more accurate information, people may not even be aware that you are coercing them. They may not even realize what their choices are if you have loaded the language with which they think.
I don't know if you can do that successfully and the person not be aware of the coercion. You would need to isolate a person from the world to such a degree that you become their only source of information, and that's just not likely unless we're talking about obvious abuse. People normally exist within several social spheres of influence, from parents to peers to institutions, and it is very difficult to have them all be in complete agreement.
Most information bubbles are of our own making. We seek out echo chambers and like-minded individuals. And we do a better job of that than any propaganda machine could.
It wasn't so hard to isolate people when most of them never traveled more than 50 miles from where they were born, which was all of history minus a recent comparatively paper-thin slice in recent times. Most people more than a couple of hundred years ago could live their whole lives without having a 20 minute converstion with someone of a different religion or no religion. Knowledge of other religions was often limited to caricatures and stereotypes their own religion taught them. And now that that is no longer the case, we see more peole switching denominations, religions, or turning away from religion altogether than ever before. But about half of teens still follow the same religion their parents did or one that's very similar, in the USA.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/202...and-teens/
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.
