Combine that with majority in many democratic systems being 51%.

And we’re in for a hell of a mediocre time.

Even if there's only a sucker born every minute, the web makes it easier to find them than hoping they come to within earshot of you or read your pamphlet.

My dad's mom, who I rarely visited other than for brief trips (his folks were avid dancers and would always show up at OUR house on Saturday evenings), watched my sisters and I so that my parents could go to a class reunion. Usually this would fall onto my mom's folks, but they were on some sort of vacation trip.

Anyway, my grandmother apparently really enjoyed reading tabloids. I had spent significant amounts of time at my other grandmothers' house reading Ripley's Believe It or Not books from cover to cover, and so I just started doing the same at my other grandmothers' house while eating Violets, a perfumed candy that was apparently popular amongst women at some point in time. Anyway, I thought that everything I was reading was true, including giant ants that were eating corrugated aluminum.

I spoke up to my grandfather, asking him whether he had protected his shed against these monstrous incursions, and he looked at me like I had 3 heads. It wasn't until my mom saw what I was reading when she returned that she understood what was happening.

What woke me up to the scam? It wasn't some Dostoevsky mock-execution come-to-Jesus moment. It was a gradual realization that none of these claims made as much sense as other explanations. And a slow but building sense of anger at the assholes who had made all this bullshit up to line their own pockets.

The information available now is also vastly more watered-down, subjected to marketing-infused misinformation, and almost designed to keep people from gaining more information.

From that perspective, literacy is really just making it easier to convince people of lies.