It’s up to the people to use their brains (…lmfao)
My radicalizing adult realization was that as a species we're incredibly dumb.
And I don't mean that in terms of the usual way in which people say "people are dumb!" and throw their hands in the air to explain the latest absurd thing.
I mean on a deeper, more fundamental and hopeless level. We are not reasonable, rational creatures. Just because we figured out what rationality means and can employ it as a tool, generally across most of our species we are survival machines, and our brains are tuned to do one thing only, which is explain why you feel things so you can predict danger.
This makes us ridiculously easy to manipulate and sway, because we have vastly deep brains that will create an entire universe of stories to explain an emotion, and it will do this in your own voice so you think it's your own good ideas and it will fool you into believing your own stories, even if they don't make a shred of sense. This is why you can have educated, smart people like doctors and nurses become anti-vax or climate scientists denying climate change. We are entirely emotional creatures and we trick ourselves into believing our fears all day long, every day, and we can't ever get out. We're stuck down a hole with no way out. Lost in our own world of biases and attaching to backwards storylines to explain them.