This sounds like the Philip K. Dick short story "The Mold of Yancy" (1955). In that story, the government of Callisto creates the person of Yancy and uses him to guide the population's thoughts on any number of topics. A group of people come up with carefully-crafted, folksy stories for him to tell the population so that they fall into line without realizing they're being controlled by the government.
Earth surreptitiously investigates and discovers this. With the aid of one of the disaffected "Yance-men", Sipling, they subtly alter Yancy's personality and presentation to break the population's conformity.
To demonstrate the mushy views of war the people are being inculcated with, Sipling asks his son about war.
Promptly, the boy answered: "War is bad. War is the most terrible thing there is. It almost destroyed mankind."
Eying his son intently, Sipling demanded: "Did anybody tell you to say that?"
The boy faltered uncertainly. "No, sir."
"You really believe those things?"
"Yes, sir. It's true, isn't it? Isn't war bad?"
Sipling nodded. "War is bad. But what about just wars?"
Without hesitation the boy answered: "We have to fight just wars, of course”
"Why?"
"Well, we have to protect our way of life."
"Why?"
Again, there was no hesitation in the boy's reedy answer. "We can't let them walk over us, sir. That would encourage aggressive war. We can't permit a world of brute power. We have to have a world of-" He searched for the exact word. "A world of law."
One of the ways that they subvert Yancy's promulgation of conformity and demonstrate that differences are acceptable is to use Yancy's established love of gardening to show that different plants like different things, and, by analogy, so do people.
"Yes," Yancy repeated, "it's really hot. Too hot for those primroses - they like shade” A fast pan-up showed he had carefully planted his primroses in the shadows at the base of his garage. "On the other hand," Yancy continued, in his smooth, good-natured, over-the-back-fence conversational voice, "my dahlias need lots of sun."
The camera leaped to show the dahlias blooming frantically in the blazing sunlight.
Throwing himself down in a striped lawnchair, Yancy removed his straw hat and wiped his brow with a pocket handkerchief. "So," he continued genially, "if anybody asked me which is better, shade or sun, I'd have to reply it depends on whether you're a primrose or a dahlia." He grinned his famous guileless boyish
grin into the cameras. "I guess I must be a primrose - I've had all the sun I can stand for today."
