Deception and misinformation can do a lot more than just generate personal gains, done properly it can also control the thoughts of the population to a very sig

Deception and misinformation can do a lot more than just generate personal gains, done properly it can also control the thoughts of the population to a very significant degree. As an example, look at how the public's extremely passionate opinion (both imprecise aggregate opinion, as well as precise individual opinions) on the absolute necessity of social distancing seems to have changed dramatically in the last two weeks. > there is the "want to believe" aspect of emotionally motivated thinking causing them to believe something merely because of how it makes them feel even if it is an absurdity This one is particularly interesting, because it is damn near impossible for one to 100% accurately perceive whether they are falling victim to various mental shortcomings (motivated reasoning, state dependent memory, post-hoc rationalization, etc etc etc) themselves - there are just way too many variables and neurological processes (that we have little understanding of) involved, and most processing is not (so they say) done in the conscious mind. If you take the example above, if you were to ask people who happened to hold extremely hardline positions on social distancing 2 weeks ago, their mind would instantaneously be able to produce an absolutely righteous and flawless (in their mind's evaluation) reason for the complete 180 in their stance. And from a more meta-perspective, I suspect there will most likely be some of this very thing happening as some people read these words. This is just how humanity works, for the time being at least. Perhaps this phenomenon has something to do with the difficulty in changing the world.