“We humans have evolved two aspects of our awareness over time that might be referred to as sentinels. They watch for signs of things that lie in their realm of specialization — and they are predictive. So part of their function is to detect and respond to situations that have not yet entirely materialized… but might.

The first is for threats, and the other (that I wish to speak of here… there are more than two, and this can be seen from other perspectives) is for opportunities.

Either one of these can be totally hijacked by information, particularly due to the fact that either or both can be ‘primed’ by nothing more than exposure to framing stimuli. Once properly primed, they will see little other than what the framing ‘suggests’, and can become completely disabled… in the sense that they no longer detect actual threats or opportunities. Instead, they will then detect ‘figures’ that correlate with what the framing stimuli suggested. Even when those figures are figments of their own feedback…

So it is that, without exceptionally careful awareness of this (and other features of our social and representational cognition), entire populations of human beings will divide into fragmented, conflicting factions… at the drop of the right kind of hat… and proceed from there to acts of terrible ignorance, delusion, wrongminded righteousness… and so on.

And until we learn, together, to understand and respond to these peculiarities of our human condition, we will be destined not merely for social and ideological confusion… we will be available to vast programs of both purposeful and accidental deception. So we must develop something resembling immunity… not merely for diseases of the body… but those of the mind, and, particularly, those aspects of the mind that seek, process and relate to… information.”

— an intelligence agent