Okay so I think I understand the gist of what he is getting at and it does hold roughly true. There are a few problems with the proposition: 1) All humans operate this way. This has little to do with programming and everything with being a social animal. We have done experiments to show this dramatically, there are videos on youtube. If you want to see a dramatic example of the difference between how our brains are engineered vs other animals look for videos on chimpanzee / human high compliance experiments. The difference between humans and chimps is a stark one. Chimps are far more independent than us and can reason through various problems specifically designed for their cognitive design far far far quicker than we can. Humans on the other hand are HIGHLY HIGHLY COMPLIANT. Somewhere in our evolutionary past we traded away high levels of cognitive independence for high levels of social compliance because our survival strategy started to favour groups that had high abilities for collaboration. All that he is saying is that we are a highly collaborative species and our brains are designed to be weakly independent highly submissive to the social requirements of the group. This is what allows us to build technology and civilizations and chimps still live in the forrest and play genocide wars with competing groups for survival. 2) When he says " you cannot talk to these brainwashed people " ... well that kind of misses the point. Humans don't have conversations. We have complicated social rituals that are primarily centered around negotiating temporary and permanent alliances with various groups of humans in order to exchange the labour of our alliance for the resources of the group. Every conversation is a kind of trade, very frew conversations happen where there is just a pure exchange of information where any actual data processing happens. It's even worse than that, when we have conversation, we almost never actually process the information on the spot. Instead we store it and walk around with it for a while and eventually figure out how or if to integrate it into the database sitting in our head. So, no, you aren't going to change anyones mind in a conversation. Partially because of the economics of thought. Partially because we are a highly compliant species. But probably also because you need high group cohesion during times of war. You cannot go to war if your troops are independently minded, you can only go to war if everyone in the group can be brainwashed into a singular direction because the reality is most of them are going to die. We come from those that survived these wars and who passed on their cognitive abilities to integrate into war parties. 3) He fails to mention that in a highly compliant species, those that control the structures that individuals finds them selves in will control the alliance / belief systems of those in that system. We may not be able to control / change what people think in a conversation, but you can control the landscape of information people are surrounded by and people will reflect those beliefs. This is how advertising and propaganda works. Build a gilded cage for the animal and surround it with consistent messaging and you can get the animal to do anything you want. It's pretty straight forward. 4) This is why places like this exist and this is why people on facebook believe what they believe. Everyone here got yanked out of the matrix in their own way, but we are here because we control the messaging and framing and it suits our needs. Anyone whose brain is calibrated to a set of social expectations that you find on Facebook will find it difficult to unplug because it takes time and a bit of work. But, it can be done. This is why the left is fighting so hard to gain institutional control, because they know institutional control means you control the messaging which means you control what people believe. I'm not sure if he is lying, but it sure feels like he is putting english on the cueball, it's not like this is new knowledge. Civilization has been playing these games for 50 000 years.