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I haven't read the Prince of Nothing series, but surely you've read Neal Stephensen? "We used to be p-zombies until (some of us) actually became sentient (maybe)" is the premise of a couple of his books.
While I sympathize with your take in general (I too know people who will just swallow The Latest Thing uncritically and there's no point talking to them about it), it's not stupidity and it's not new. People are largely group-thinkers and want to go along to get along and also lack the necessary time or energy to dig deeply into the particulars of whether a particular claim is true. Even here on the Motte we see people sometimes show up and plaster a laundry list of highly risible deepity-sounding assertions in a wall of text, and they rarely get much more than vibes-based pushback because who wants to hunt down each and every bullet point to dispute it? And on the rare occasions when someone does that, the deepity-poster disappears and returns after a while to do the same thing.
Jesse Singhal is slowly driving himself mad on Twitter because he keeps doing this with trans activists: "No, look at these fifteen studies I have carefully analyzed which show that what you are saying is not actually true!" he says for the fifteenth time, thinking that this time, Facts and Logic will make them stop calling him a transphobic Nazi.
There isn't some "elite" class of human capable of actually thinking. What we have are agreeable people who don't think most battles are worth fighting (especially at the cost of career and reputation and friendships) and a few highly disagreeable people (often on the autistic spectrum) who absolutely will fight over these things. I hesitate to say that the latter actually have much to do with building bridges and advancing civilization, even if we probably do need a few of them around.
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