"You've touched on something here that I have never been able to understand. You see it during elections in the US, that fawning, grovelling embrace of a power figure who in most cases is a despicable human being, ...."
"Why are we so guidable that we reject the best science has to offer over an impossible fairy story? There is a big, fundamental flaw in humans that must have been an essential part of the social or tribal glue that today makes us very easy to exploit, but the mother of all exploitations is religion and yet hundreds of millions have abandoned reason to become part of a fairy story of talking snakes and mighty floods and 6 days of creation."
It is indeed a strange situation which appears to defy logic.
It's as if there were forces that prevent the average human from acquiring a balanced and reasoned understanding of the world and what happens around them.
Instead of insights and reason based on a balanced synthesis of active thought, emotional "intelligence" and grounding from an organic sense of oneself within one's environment, we see a wacky expression of herd instinct, surface emotions, physical pleasure or pain and generally that which makes a person feel good/comfortable in the moment.
Whatever feeds that latter scenario has a very easy job and can convince people of just about anything.
Considering the average IQ is now less than 100, thinking and reasoning is not strong enough to make much difference which is why no amount of reasoned argument or evidence will sway such a person from their emotional based beliefs and image of the world.
Because of the separation of thought and emotion a person could have a high IQ, be quite skilled in thinking but emotionally not much older than a child and therefore hold beliefs that are completely at odds with their thinking ability and knowledge.
In such cases, often the thinking becomes a servant of the more deep seated powerful emotional function but the person does not even recognize this.
As I think you have remarked on occasion, the idea that all humans are the same or equal is simply not true. There can be more difference between people than between a human child and a chimpanzee.
