Does the last paragraph still holds? Today a lot of public talk is about the manipulation (as opposed to genuinely convincing, i.e. presenting the actual argume

Does the last paragraph still holds? Today a lot of public talk is about the manipulation (as opposed to genuinely convincing, i.e. presenting the actual argument and not the most effective and machiavellistic argument ) of public opinion, and when we have masses of people specializing in this sort of manipulation, with help from social (psychology etc) scientists, and automated ('machine learning') optimization. In this climate, I'm not sure if it does. That's bad, because we lost the basic trust in human communication to say what you mean. Of course this is not meant to be nostalgic, deception was always present, but never so normalized, natural and _not_ a social taboo as it is today.