Is that anything approaching reason? Hardly. It's just how folks are taught to be persuaded. You could also frame it as a food quality issue.
Now, am I wrong to expect a better standard out of people - or am I wrong to permit underhanded approaches for the sake of getting my meme out? According to some authors, that's an irreconcilable moral dilemma for each to battle alone throughout their lives... Scratch that, though, here's what.
Considering many more people watch the ball games than the lawmaking debates, what is it that sets the baseline societal standard for convincing persuasion?Examples of acts of convincing persuasion displayed to the general public by the devices of mass communication. (And it matters very little, to our learning ape-minds, whether the image of the convincing persuader is framed as "news" or a "movie".)
What is the use of mass communication, then? A broadcasting device brings (a subset of) some Narrative - i.e. some network of meanings that people attribute to the world around them - into the life of each individual recipient, for the purpose of influencing that life.
Now, the device is working; we are shown things on the hellboxes and we reckon with the ideas which the things mean. Given the activity of mass communication is cheap and ubiquitous, and the resulting "culture soup", in which we grow up immersed, is very much non-optional to the individual, and also very much non-malleable by the individual.
So we have these 2 registers of mass communication, "news" to show "what is normal to happen" and "art" to show "what is permissible to conceptualize", which are broadcast to us obligatorily and in unclear proportions, and that rather bizarre datastream is what defines us as "humanity" and "society" to ourselves, and serves as a sort of civilizational baseline outside of any individual's personal life, studied disciplines, etc.
However, funny business with the artifacts underlying this system of organization: (1) the construction of the broadcasting devices; and (2) the construction of those narratives which seem to almost have transcendent powers over everyone affected... what's in that stuff, anyway? Oops, you're not allowed to know - it's a trade secret!
Wait a second, so the stuff which directly teaches me how I will interpret my life and that of others, is a trade secret? Explain to me that we are living in a democracy again?
When the sources from which you learn, and the contents of what you learn, are someone's property, it means that the knowledge in your head is someone's property, which means that becoming fluent in someone's intellectual property makes (part of) you their property.
...I guess those could be the rudiments of a more orderly sort of argument?
If food preparation is a trade secret, and you go eat, how could you be sure that what you've been sold is food and not just particularly well-processed... wood shavings? (you let them expect you to say "faeces" here, and/or reference Soylent Green if they are of its demographic)
Similarly, if knowledge preparation is a trade secret:
- how do you know that the skill you're studying is a real discipline, and is not just the setup to an elaborate rug-pull? - how do you know the work you're doing has an impact other than training your AI replacement? - how do you know the relatable human interactions shown on the telly are as non-toxic as they're framed, and are not simply the producers' way of normalizing fraudulence?
Obviously does not work on people who have not professed to acknowledge one of the above values, such as believers, nihilists... As always, adapt to listener (and if the listener prevents you from doing that - that's very much the same principle of disempowerment as drives the intellectual property regime, only inverted).
Both sorts of question then can be answered "by trusting the evaluation of a third party", which is what epistemically illiterate people will default to, and boils down to a more general argument which must be conducted even more personally. E.g. you take all instances in which the norms of society have failed the person, and extrapolate how the intellectual property regime's influence is equivalent.
