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If I'm catching your general drift, you're saying it's better to use various means of info management / dissemination than bullets and bombs. I'll agree with you--I'd rather be lied to than shot, or than have someone else shot. Problem is, it's not that simple. I hope going with a hypothetical helps here--sometimes doing so is a way of evading truth/realities, but that's not my intent. Here goes: what if there was a 'big lie' (lie is a strong word, but that's what we're talking about if we're 'managing information') that got everyone to stop their various wars everywhere. Let's say, by means of Hollywood special effects and so on, enough people became convinced that the world was being invaded by aliens, that people stopped shooting each other and started to cooperate in defending vs. aliens. If the alien invasion scenario is too far fetched, substitute bird flu, or global warming, or some other catastrophe. How long would it take, once the 'big threat' lie was successful, before we'd have further 'info management' to maintain it, and to keep people in power who knew coordinated/knew about it, and stop those who questioned it, and so on, to the point of 'peace' by such means being so repressive that fighting and dying might not seem extreme. I'm sure there are cases of clever manipulations of info. preventing unnecessary wars, but I can't go to the extreme--and as I took your statement, it allowed for such--of letting Bush-era 'info management' continue in order to save lives. If anything, Bush-era death tolls show the need for exactly the opposite.