Let's start with a near certainty.  In most cases most people will do what it takes to stay alive.  It's called the survival instinct and it operates unconsciously.  Fight or flight is the most coarse, outward manifestation of the evolved instinct.  A social survival instinct, also largely unconsious, develops as well.  Many scientists believe pressures from the importance of social skill to survival created the large human brain.  If this is so, then much of our brain is likely devoted to sorting social relations, largely on an unconscious level.  Many of us will smile at a murderer befor

It is important to understand the forces at work, not through a paranoid lens but rather through an understandable human behavior lens.  I like the way Assange describes the process here.  He first reads from the screenplay of a movie purportedly about Assange and wikileaks to be released this November.  The film opens with a lie-filled scene claiming that Iran is close to developing nuclear weapons and would sell the technology.  He reads 2 or 3 lies embedded in the film, then goes on to say,