In Opinion Control in the Democracies, Terence H. Qualter discusses the assumption that we could shield ourselves from propaganda by recognizing its tricks; that by exposing or identifying the propaganda content of messages one could disarm propagandists and make them ineffective:
As Jacques Ellul warned, these were dangerous assumptions. The person who imagined that he could not be the victim of propaganda because he could distinguish truth from falsehood, 'is extremely susceptible to propaganda, because when propaganda does tell the "truth," he is then convinced that it is no longer propaganda: moreover, his self-confidence makes him all the more vulnerable to attacks of which he is unaware.As another put it: 'persuasion may destroy us, so long as we contine to believe we are not persuasible.'
