Iamon lyme:

> If you fear being manipulated by conscious/unconscious attempts to persuade you, the remedy is easy.. decide for yourself, based on your own reasoning, if what you are being told is true or not. No one can manipulate your thoughts unless you allow it.

Nobody can tell you what to think, but over a lifetime you can be taught to think a certain way. People can be indoctrinated and they don't even know it. If it were not possible to influence the way people think, advertising would be a dead industry. You take a piece of propaganda. You repeat it over and over. You repepat it so much, that people grow to believe it is true. Then fear is a powerful motivator. Fear is the most primal of instincts. It triggers our survival mechanisms. Fear combined with propaganda is the most powerful way to control the masses. "You are poor because the evil Jew bankers are taking your money while you work like a slave." "The capitalist counterrevolutionaries want to return our country to its former state in which the rich aristocrats had everything while we had nothing. We have to stop the enemies of the revolution at all costs." "The godless communists are bend on world domination. They want to attack us with their missiles. We have to build bomb shelters and root out the communist threat in our midst. Are you a member of the communist party? If you are, you are godless and unAmerican."

The ignorant masses bought all this propaganda and so they became antisemites, radical revolutionaries and fascist anticommunists. Fear overcame reason, often with a few speeches and a propaganda campaign.

At some point every modern government has used fear and propaganda to make people think and believe in a way that is politically and economically convenient. To say that people can reason through propaganda is rather naive because propaganda and fearmongering easily overcome reason. It is like saying that everyone can reason through a book of tensor calculus. Not everyone is equipped to reason through, because the educational system failed to teach people how to read and reason while casting fear and prejudice aside.