Once we know the basics about every subject there is, it becomes extremely difficult for any con artist to take advantage of you. Much of the time these people trying to sell you an idea are not doing it out of malice but they are performing a job they were hired to do: sell you something. They simply don't have the time to help you understand all the details, let alone the very general concepts. Much of the time these sales people know they are dealing with developmentally arrested children in adult bodies and they know most of them have been traumatized already since childhood.

Politicians and others use misinformation, public relations tactics to manipulate public opinion and views. Dr. Noam Chomsky and many others throughout the decades have revealed that public relations experts are specialists at manufacturing consent. They can make people believe that cows fly into space on a daily basis or that eating sewage is good for you. Actually, the former is actually true in that reconstituted sewage waste is spread over our food crops and has been done for decades without the public's knowledge. This is even in Canada! Many people claim they want to be free, independent but also want some magical nanny state to 'take care' of them. You can't have both! On the other hand being free and independent doesn't mean you can't help each other. In essence we are given false choices and fake dichotomies. For instance, when I was younger I had significant worries about money, so I started going to university groups with communists. Much of what they said resonated with me, but then they started taking about taking individual freedoms away and that's when I started to get very nervous and questioned their group-think. I was eventually kicked out of those groups.