My biological father once claimed he was "totally immune" to advertising; I nearly fell over dead that instant with laughter. Roger Ailes, Edward Bernays, and

My biological father once claimed he was "totally immune" to advertising; I nearly fell over dead that instant with laughter. Roger Ailes, Edward Bernays, and William Randolph Hearst applied similar principles, leaving lasting influences on the course of American history: one bent a hundred-fifty million Americans towards a retreaded version of the Nixon ideology, one made cigarettes appeal to women and had democracies overthrown for fruit companies, and the latter decided how to spin the news, became a Nazi, and nearly convinced America fascism was a "good idea". I don't see how any human alive, unless they lived under a rock, can reasonably trace the origin of any of their beliefs or preferences. So, I must conclude beliefs, preferences, and ideologies are more or less arbitrary because most people don't spend metacognition effort on analyzing their formation or their change.