Democracy and Propaganda

Human is a rational being, yet he is not perfect. We do possess rational faculty, our potential to judge what is right and what wrong is, what reality is and what is manipulations, yet we are prone to err, and that is why it is every Individual's responsibility to keep a keen eye on his standpoints and avoid the "herd-instincts" to take over his personal ability to judge.
We discussed how group psychology affects the crowd mentality that can easily be misdirected to create havoc in forms of riots, terrorism, aggression and other forms of crimes. "The Crowd Mentality and Terrorism"
Yet, the group psychology not only is used to perpetuate some wrong, many a times the group psychology and manipulations also are used to avoid unnecessary clashes of choices and attain the desired results in best possible way that can be achieved through persuasions and propaganda.
"Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behaviour to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist." —Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell
In a democracy, where majority rule decides the policies to be put forward and accepted, the Propaganda and manipulation proves out to be necessary and inalienable tool for the politics and politicians.
Edward Bernays, popularly known as the father of public relations techniques explicitly explained the necessity of manipulations and propaganda in the Democratic system. In his book Propaganda, he mentions—
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires, which control the public mind.
Being the close nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays was well aware of the psychoanalysis and group psychology.
Although in a democracy, where the certain individual rights can be maintained by means of property rights, freedom of speech and expressions etc, we can assume that manipulating masses in order to rule over them is not that easy, yet we forget that since our early childhood, whatever we use, eat, drink, learns and allowed to accept is closely knitted by the same governing system and that provide enough indoctrination for the citizen to accept the governing system without any difficulty, inquiry or a surge to know "Are we victims of the Propaganda"?
In a free market with no government interference, this possibility of indoctrination reduces to minimum as any propaganda can be counter debated and exposed freely, free market provide the common citizen a way to create new choices too so that the spectrum of available solutions may increase.
On the other hand, in a government controlled monopolistic system, no matter it may be democracy, the lack of options and inability of the system to provide new options often creates hurdle and extreme problems regarding propaganda and manipulations.
Nazism was a propaganda accepted by Germans democratically, and Hitler besieged the democracy too with the success of that propaganda.
Most of the policies put forth by the politicians for the electorate are basically tuned up by certain propagandas and the politicians do their best to manipulate the electorate in order to win their confidence.
It obviously becomes the responsibility of the individual than, to attain the self-knowledge, to understand and accept the importance of rational selfishness, his motto of existence and use his rational faculty to decide for what is real and what is an ill-propaganda.
In a government controlled system where the system decides what we should learn, how we should be educated, it becomes difficult for an Individual to actually analyze how free he is. Often he fails to question the decisions made for him by the invisible rulers and accepts the rule as the only possible way, often he turns out to be eulogizing those regulations without actually surmising the reason behind them or checking whether they make any sense.
The heard-instinct and group psychology works well over such indoctrinating system and the individual accepts the dominance of the ruling few, as the only possible way.
Yet, not all accepts the defeat and some innovative minds do dare to question, search and find out the realities and expose the truth based on reason. Often we call them iconoclasts. Society never accepts the Iconoclasts and their entrepreneurial innovations, the society victimizes the iconoclasts and terms the new options searched through as treason, treachery, heresy and anti-social they term the iconoclast as anarchist, the enemy of system. Yet, history is evident that only the iconoclast who dares to challenge the majority against the ill-beliefs, and denies accepting the popular ways of indoctrinations, provides the stimulus for the society to prosper, flourish and liberate itself further.