An interesting question

"How has American civilization been shaped by the fact that there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe advertising?"

From Daniel J. Boorstin's Hidden History, in his essay The Rhetoric of Democracy.

Never was there a more outrageous or more unscrupulous or more ill-informed advertising campaign than that by which the promoters for the American colonies brought settlers here. Brochures published in England in the seventeenth century, some even earlier, were full of hopeful overstatements, half-truths, and downright lies, along with some facts which nowadays surely would be the basis for investigation by a Better Business Bureau. Gold and silver, fountains of youth, plenty of fish, venison without limit, all these were promised, and of course some of them were actually here. How long might it have taken to settle this continent if there had not been such promotion by enterprising advertisers? How has American civilization been shaped by the fact that there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe advertising?