I always thought that the manipulation is the worse thing happening to people. Because they may do things they never wanted, and they may be easily used. Sometimes it happened for a long time and even for all their lives. It's crime when a human waste his life without knowing that's he/she is not doing what needed and supports the interests of others. A group or a single person.
But recently I understand that there is something much more powerful than manipulation. That's the provocation. By the way, when I looked for a free picture in pixaby to share here, most pictures related to provocation were having a sexual overtone. Mostly with naked or half naked woman. Maybe that means that the sexual provocation is one of the most powerful. That's why so many promoters use that in their advertisements.
But there are other kinds of provocations used by governments to manipulate citizens. I think pushing people to create big rallies is one of them. They may provoke people to arrest them. Also, to show others the power of authorities and to avoid any real revolution.
Such dirty provocation may push people to do anything wanted from them. I'm sure that there are special psychologists working on that. They learned about the human nature and even experimented on people to control their will.
We may find such provocation in TV, news, movies, TV shows and anything that transfer the information. Even physical things maybe done as pollution ecology or adding things in our food, water and even air. To make people weaker for example and to make them waste a lot of time looking at the source of the problem without solving it and in case they'll find something everything will be shown as fake. Or to make people spent their lives on medicine to not get deeper into politics.
And there maybe provocations we don't even know about. But they are changing our habits, traditions and even behavior.
So, thinking that we are somehow free could be an illusion. We just have the illusion of the choice.