When someone confronts the fact that there is manipulation all around, is there any way to protect themselves from it? Are people trapped in their perception and their emotions more vulnerable to manipulation than people who exercise more perspective? Or are both hopelessly vulnerable and there is no genuine protection outside of divine intervention? What can Creator tell us?

The basic problem you are facing is lack of knowledge and awareness about the true workings of the world, what is taking place and by whom, and what is being done fairly and above board or in a nefarious way, through a series of manipulations to maintain an unfair advantage and exploitation that causes great harm, and worsens things over time in a systematic way to drag down humanity and its future. People see the signs of this at work every day; they are the so-called "problems," many of which seem almost time‑honored as built-in features of human culture, but need not be if people can be enlightened to understand there are greater possibilities and a way to get there. We would see the question of relative merit of perception versus perspective as a false dichotomy. Authoritarian regimes, organizations, and individuals typically will squelch individual perceptions by dismissing them outright or criticizing them as being a sign of weakness or misguided, or perhaps flawed by some inner bias that blames the person wanting things to be different or resisting a perspective being foisted on them by overseers. This is seen on a large scale through your culture and all of the institutions that work against their stated aims. The "educational system" is truly a "mis-education system" that does not serve the young to encourage their initiative, enthusiasm, and wonderment but rather squelches them in service to conformity and a kind of dull groupthink comprised of information representing the lowest common denominator of overseers wanting an obedient populace as the major goal, and suppresses individuality as a potential threat to its hold on power.