In history you read about elves, fairies, little people, spirits. It was an accepted part of reality.
But now that’s obvious nonsense and if you see fairies then you need a doctor.
Are we insane now?
Yes I know, nutrition, literacy and the scientific enlightenment. But still.
I don’t get it with the body either. No we are not insane as a species and if only because insanity is defined on what we as collective see as normal. But what is “deep history”? And people don’t get send to a doctor just because they believe in fairytales, at least where I live.
Humans seem to have an inert need to have answers and guessing one seems to be better than “I don’t know” for many.
Imagine if it became the fashion to wear glasses that block out the color green. If you do not wear these glasses then you are wrong, bad and deserving of condemnation. So everybody wears them.
Three generations down the road, anybody who mentions the color green is considered a fool.
It’s an obvious idea. Maybe it happened to us.
Then there would still be the possibility for someone to take off the glasses.
Or invent spectrometers.
Or make others curious.
I’d claim that our issue is too much belief and not a lack thereof. Beliefs remove the potential for excourse y for discussions and for admission of being wrong. Believing is the act of removing an item from analysis, from critique and in its final form from thinking about it.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you - if that’s the case please apologize.
But only wrong bad people take off the glasses. So nobody does that but wrong bad people. And nobody can trust them because they’re wrong bad.
And spectrometers are clearly hippy dippy nonsense.
The wrong bad people do not sow curiosity, they sow poison!
You see how that works.
Do not discount the gravity and inertia of convention.