Society is filled with huge numbers of highly competent experts and effective collaborators, while in the meantime the culture moves away from experts, towards skepticism of authoritative knowledge and distrust for anyone “in the system”.
While this anti-authoritarian streak has roots in a healthy frontier mentality and resistance to oppression, it is damaging if not weighed against reality so it’s a distrust of false authority instead of all authority.
It’s an enormously frustrating state for medical personnel especially in the era of Covid, but it’s also a problem for any complex technological, policy, or operational matters. And it’s bad timing as those thing become evermore complex and relevant.
We are dumbing-down ourselves to death.