A while back, I had a friend that was a pastor and he was railing about guns on Facebook, how they should be banned and so on. What had brought on this tirade was a shooting by a Muslim guy which left a bunch of people dead.

In a sense, I understood his anger. At a very surface level, a bunch of people died, so there had to be someone or something to blame. Indeed, every shooting of any kind brings out these emotions, and the powers that be are especially good at using tragedies to further their own agenda.

Indeed, that's one of the evil things every authoritarian does is exploit times of vulnerable emotional states to further their agenda. Some would even say they manufacture such instances. But the point is that they further theiragenda, and not what should be learned.

My pastor friend for example had many other angles to approach the topic that he was far more qualified to talk about. He's studied theology and other religions, so he could have talked about radical Islam and aspects of that which led to the shooting. He's also counseled a lot of people, so he could talk about mental health and talk about what puts people in those states of mind. He's also a Christian who knows the depravity of man, so he could talk about how sin and vice lead to these tragic outcomes. Instead, he talked about guns, because that was what the elites were focused on. He had never held or shot a gun and couldn't tell you the first thing about them, like what's considered automatic or semi-automatic.

Yet because the propaganda was strong, he spoke exactly on the issue the elites wanted him to talk about and placed the blame on the thing the elites wanted him to place blame on.

This guy, by the way, was not stupid. He's an Ivy League graduate and very sharp. But perhaps that's why he was so susceptible to propaganda. His success was largely based around following what the authorities told him. Intellect is no protection against powerful rhetoric.

We all outsource some of our knowledge, but the problem with a fiat system is that we all too often are forced to trust entities that we had no input in. These entities are the most likely to get corrupted and used for tyranny.

We need more interactions, more direct connections so that we can figure out whether someone is trustworthy. That's a decentralized trust model and it's about time we get used to judging such things for ourselves.