They say that con men win the victim’s confidence partly by flattery. I have noticed this with an acquaintance who is both highly gullible and highly paranoid, the paranoia most likely a result of his frequently falling victim to con men; all of his cons involved flattery, the quite primitive con men/women telling him how wise and intelligent and simply great he is – and because he sees himself as a Great Man, he laps it all up.

You could divide today’s official propaganda into two broad sections:

i) The Daily Mail demographic. Here the appeal is to the the no-nonsense white van man mentality.

ii) The Guardian demographic. Here the appeal is to the “educated” and intelligent, the mostly white liberal elite.

I would prefer to read The Daily Mail, in all honesty. The DM has a scatter-shot crudity to it, a simplifying of human motivation and complexity which I take for granted and so find hard to really even notice; the propaganda isn’t aimed at my IQ/education level, so has (I guess) no effect. The Guardian, by contrast, is infuriatingly smug & prissy, and irritates every fibre of my sentience, from which I judge it is targeted at precisely my IQ/education level.

The second sector of propaganda often makes appeal to the self-perceived intellect of the victim. Here’s a good example from The Z Man, though he’s not (I judge) a propagandist, merely one of these “you can’t fool me! everything is in reality very mundane and boring” types:

Stupid people are more prone to believe fantastical explanations for events than smart people. The QAnon stuff, for example, is a clever mocking of the sorts of people inclined to believe such things. It’s a very clever person with too much time on his hands having fun at the expense of those who are not so clever. Dumb people tend to fall for conspiracy theories.

Since people naturally conspire, in every workplace & social group, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to suppose that politicians and the financial elites would do likewise, on a far grander & weirder level than Janice and Sandra bitching about Debra’s skirt at the coffee machine. A reading of Suetonius should prepare one for the possibility that, for example, Bill Clinton visited Jeffrey Epstein’s island on multiple occasions.

The Intelligence Con is to say, “only a dumb person would believe that. It really is incredible what dumb people will believe. You know, a dumb person will believe that goat-riding Satanists decide our interest rates. It really is incredible. Now, a smart person understands that there is no order to anything, that things just happen for no reason. A dumb person doesn’t want to understand this, because he can’t. You’re not dumb, are you?”

Most people don’t care if someone critiques their upper body musculature, but they take it as a personal affront if you suggest their IQ is below, say, 100. Hence, a great deal of propaganda is an Intelligence Con; which may be why I would rather take out a year’s subscription to The Daily Mail than The Guardian.