> is an educated population easier to be manipulated than an illiterate one

Good question. Depends on how the education is done. If the education is done to instill the idea that one must "believe in science", instead of learning the facts and questioning them skeptically, if one is convinced that expressing dissent is harmful and akin to violence, if questioning the dominating framework is actively discouraged and dissenters are viciously attacked, if people are taught that there can be no honest disagreement, and any different of opinion is nothing but a power move in an oppression framework, if everybody is assigned their places and recommended opinions in advance, if they are instructed that any non-conforming opinion must be silenced and suppressed - then such "educated" people are much easier to manipulated than the illiterate ones.

An illiterate person knows they are illiterate - there's no way to hide that fact from themselves. They know there are places they must tread carefully for their knowledge has obvious limits. A mal-educated person thinks they know all the answers, and learned The Truth, and thus hold the keys to the universe. Moreover, they feel a moral duty to lord over lesser creatures and guide them to The Truth, for their own benefit. This is an ideal human brick for building the totalitarian barracks.

Obviously that depends. Here is another way to phrase your question:

You spend 10 years telling John some stuff every day for hours and Jane is someone you just met.

Which one is easier to lie to?

Sounds to me like it completely depends on a lot of different things, but if you know what lie you want to tell ahead of time: obviously John is easier to lie to.

That isn't obvious at all. Folks get smitten by people they've barely met. It doesn't take years to be tricked into joining a cult: You can convince folks in a matter of months.

John might be 10 years into your lies, but he also might have caught on. You use different lies with Jane, who might not know better, and she listens wholeheartedly and with good faith.

If John is an adult and Jane isn't, Jane is easier even with the age difference. This is simply because of lack of knowledge and experience.

If one has more access to the outside world than the other, they are less likely to believe your lies.

If John knows you have mental health problems that causes you to lie and Jane doesn't, Jane is easier to lie to.

Maybe John is more suspicious of people and the world. Maybe John just shuts up to appease you, like folks that avoid talking politics with their families simply don't want to deal with things.

Are you someone younger? DO you have authority over them?

There are so many things that affect whether or not you can lie to someone.

You hear something from someone who's been talking to you for 10 years, and from someone you've just met. Whose lie is easier to detect?

Here is an even better way to phrase the question with respect to schooling:

You spend 10 years telling John and Jane some stuff every day for hours. John also gets told stuff for hours by a third party while Jane gets all information from you. Which one is easier to lie to?

School adds a third party so that the child isn't reliant on things taught by their parents.

It is interesting because for me it was obvious that Jane will be the easiest to lie to by far. John knows you much better.

Usually psychopaths and sociopaths are always moving so people don't know who they are and they can fool them easily.

What you are saying is if someone does trust you, you can lie to her easier, which is true, but then you will loose the trust and bond that took a long time to get.

What better way to manipulate a population than by “educating” them?

Yet if you don't know math, you can be ripped off. If you can't read the contract or understand law at all, you can be manipulated.

Which would be a compelling argument if there were no other way to learn math or law.

Indeed.

And the math schools concentrate on isn’t particular useful in the context of a modern society. So what that you once memorized a geometric proof long enough to take a test if you don’t understand how interest works and how credit card companies take advantage of you.

Not everyone can just learn on their own, and if your parents aren't real great at math or law or teaching, you really need school.

That some people need kidney dialysis is not an argument that everyone getting kidney dialysis is the only way to stay healthy.

If you can't learn from books or videos or online lectures or parents or tutors, I doubt generic schooling is really going to be able to help much either, but if it does great. People learn in different ways and different kids need different resources, but that's an argument against a one-size fits all public schooling system, not in favor.

I would like to point out that in our current world it would be very very difficult to end up illiterate under just about any circumstance. Reading and writing don’t need to be explicitly taught unless you are under extreme time pressure (like the need to get the pupils to be able to read their texts on their own so you can increase class sizes and decrease the cost of schooling).

> Yes, totalitarian states have used education to indoctrinate masses to maintain order and power. Depends on who does the teaching and how it is taught, that is why critical thinking is key.

None of the German Empire, Weimar Republic or Russian Empire were totalitarian states. If education is protective against indoctrination the effect is at best weak. A lively marketplace of ideas is no guard against organized thugs if the liberals are not willing to defend liberalism. Critical thinking is a red herring.

Weimar Republic was democracy, because WWI victors forced Germany into democracy. Weimar Republic was also failing mess, from start to end. With fights and screaming in parlament, with political murders, with attempted revolutions and with increasing violence in the streets. Germans themselves did not wanted democracy at any point. They have found loss in war humiliating and unfair.

Weimar Republic also had highly militarized civil service, comited to military values rather then to democracy.

Russian Empire was dictatorship to large extend. Not as much as communism, but it was not democracy with political freedoms. The little reforms they had were basically too little too late. There were little of such a thing as citizen right in most places. Peasants also had huge illiteracy rates.

The Russian empire was an absolute monarchy until 1905 that was definitely totalitarian by modern understanding. The subsequent semi-democratic government was ineffective.

The Russian Empire was authoritarian. It was not totalitarian under any definition of the term I’ve ever encountered. There was an extremely lively press, active intellectual life and real if toothless political opposition. It was absolutely nothing like under the Soviet boot.

> How did educated, liberal society respond to such terrorism? What was the position of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party and its deputies in the Duma (the parliament set up in 1905)? Though Kadets advocated democratic, constitutional procedures, and did not themselves engage in ­terrorism, they aided the terrorists in any way they could. Kadets collected money for terrorists, turned their homes into safe houses, and called for total amnesty for arrested terrorists who pledged to continue the mayhem. Kadet Party central committee member N. N. Shchepkin declared that the party did not regard terrorists as criminals at all, but as saints and martyrs. The official Kadet paper, Herald of the Party of People’s Freedom, never published an article condemning political assassination. The party leader, Paul Milyukov, declared that “all means are now legitimate . . . and all means should be tried.” When asked to condemn terrorism, another liberal leader in the Duma, Ivan Petrunkevich, famously replied: “Condemn terror? That would be the moral death of the party!”

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-l...

Which is what is so depressing about "cancel culture" and radical redefinition of what is "hate speech". Liberals and the rational center are not defending those ideals which gave us our modern Western civilisation.

Even on this website, merely questioning the validity of some of the aspects of the politically correct zeitgeist will get your post flagged and hidden from public consumption.

Free speech as how some people like to define it now (anything can and should be said) was never an ideal, and certainly never reality.

It’s funny how the people complaining about “cancel culture” (usually a roundabout way of complaining you can’t say racist things anymore) are completely fine with twisting especially history to benefit themselves.

> usually a roundabout way of complaining you can’t say racist things anymore

As an external observer, this seems to me exactly the problem. Discourse is so polarized, that nobody can say "this thing that started as a reaction to overt racism has gone too far" without people replying "that just means you're racist".

The situation has come to where there are ridiculous abuses going on, and criticizing them is anathema because the initial purpose of the system being abused was to counter a bias.

Hell, even writing this comment, meta-analyzing the situation, I'm semi-afraid will have personal impact to me, which is pretty indicative of the problem.

> Discourse is so polarized, that nobody can say

A large part of it is signaling through terminology. If you use terms such as "cancel culture" and "liberals", it's pretty clear you're either a right-wing US citizen or someone who wishes they were one.

There are definitely people that are able to discuss certain social trends becoming a problem without using dogmatic terminology, which is where the conversation becomes interesting for all participants. As opposed to a horrifying journey plumbing the depths of polarised discourse.

American liberals runs the social networks almost everyone uses so whenever they decide to cancel stuff the whole world gets affected. Therefore it makes sense that many people all over the world learns to hate them and their cancel culture.

> If you use terms such as "cancel culture" and "liberals", it's pretty clear you're either a right-wing US citizen or someone who wishes they were one.

So you can't say "cancel culture has gone too far" without signaling you're right-wing? I'm not up to speed with the exact politics, but I've heard the term in non-right wing contexts.

Seems to me like that would make it impossible to talk about things, which is what I'm seeing. How would you talk about Twitter canceling people without using the term "cancel culture?

Am I the only person who found it ironic and meta that, in a thread about canceling people based on certain words and phrases, OP kind of tried to "cancel" your argument based on your use of the phrase "cancel culture". We are deep into the recursion now.

Well that's kind of the issue, right? There are some things you can't talk about because if you want to talk about them, it means you're a racist that just wants to legitimize racism.

Judging by the number of downvotes on a comment about this very thing, I'm not optimistic.