This whole passage reminds me of the Yuri Bezmenov interview.
Maybe the information coming into a nation, into the minds of its citizens, is not a national security risk if that nation is properly educated?
I mean, if we can’t use the logic of math and philosophy to filter empirical conclusions – I am not sure what is left.
In the same breath, maybe Yuri is right.
I don’t know that any amount of education can stand up to a lie spoken with the power of persuasion behind it (i.e. propaganda)…
Something like: Affluence > Apathy > Ignorance > More fragile to lies.
Gosh humanity is broken, aren’t we?
The unspoken question underlying all these explorations was the same: if the free societies of the West win this great world war, how might their young people be educated in a way that made them worthy of that victory—and that made another war on that scale at worst avoidable and at best unthinkable? Perhaps, though, we might say that there was one other point on which most of these thoughtful observers were agreed: miseducation had left the ordinary citizens of the Western democracies in the helpless thrall to the propagandistic machinations of unscrupulous nationalist movements.
-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)