Richard Fernandez is discovering what Bruce Charlton knows in Addicted to Distraction, or what Lehi learned in his vision of the Great and Spacious Building many gross of years ago.

Nassim Taleb observed that “the opposite of education isn’t ignorance but miseducation.” With miseducation your head is stuffed, but stuffed with nonsense. That is equally true of current events as it is of pedagogy. The dangerous opposite of information isn’t the absence of a signal, but misinformation. The victims of miseducation and misinformation are both brimming with knowledge, only of the wrong kind.

…

With misinformation as with miseducation, the public sees but not in due proportion. Its calculations are put all out of reckoning. The image of the world is presented like a reflection in a funhouse mirror, with certain aspects greatly enlarged while others are minimized almost to invisibility.

This is your reminder that we live in a tyranny of opinion.  Attention is the currency of the realm.  You are not just being made to obey.  You are being made to care.   Your mind is the coal for their dark Satanic mills.