I saw a video on YouTube the other day of a speaker addressing a large audience. During the Q&A, someone asked the speaker about politicians, and he proceeded to explain that he felt politicians tend to do things for money in exchange for championing legislation that helps the donor. In the comments on this video, someone wrote, "I'm glad someone is saying this; he's right and people need to learn it."

Assuming this the speaker is correct (at least to some degree), isn't it still a little silly to attribute the persistence of this problem to people not knowing? That's akin to saying that some people smoke cigarettes just because they haven't yet learned that they're bad for their health.

In a lot of cases, not knowing is not the true cause of the problem. The political machine in this country is probably far from squeaky clean, but most people feel this is true already. And the danger of oversimplifying any problem by chocking it up the fact that most people just don't know is that you're going to devise a solution based on informing people, when they're already informed. Such an approach is unlikely to change anyone's behavior.

It's much more difficult to create a strategy to influence people when it's predicated on the assumption that people already know. Telling people facts is easy, but telling them where to go once they've got the facts is much harder.