Literally everything these days is a cult. Including companies (e.g. Apple), and money itself (e.g. cryptocurrencies).
It makes me think that there must be some really powerful evolutionary processes in place which make it so that irrational idolists have more children and live longer than rational people.
Independent thinking is simply about questioning everything you're taught.
Most people believe that if some idea is popular, then it must be right; but in reality, most of the time the opposite is true.
Clearly there's a good way to think independently and a bad way; a good way of thinking as a group and a bad. How is the line drawn? It's certainly not a line that can be drawn in advance.
In your post you said:
> It makes me think that there must be some really powerful evolutionary processes in place which make it so that irrational idolists have more children and live longer than rational people.
That seems rather essentialist to me: Do you really think people are so transparent that you can not only judge whether they are intrinsically rational or irrational but also that quality is hereditary and also that there is a mysterious force that makes us idiots via natural selection?
Better instead to ponder what social and psychological processes can draw someone into a cult and how those processes play out in your own life. We take for granted how thin the margin is between our own lives and the lives of others. It is almost surely the case that all of us hold absolutely absurd delusions about our lives and how we should go about them.
If you look at mathematics, an individual who understands the basic rules can prove a statement to themselves without having to defer any judgement to a higher intellectual authority.
In most aspects of life, people tend to defer the majority of their thinking to intellectual authorities; 'thought leaders'.
>> Do you really think people are so transparent that you can not only judge whether they are intrinsically rational or irrational but also that quality is hereditary and also that there is a mysterious force that makes us idiots via natural selection?
It's probably both genetic and environmental. I think that there is an evolutionary reason why humans are so bad at making the distinction between cause and effect (and nature vs nurture) - There is often a self-reinforcing feedback loop between the two.
Isn't this just as dangerous a heuristic as the reverse?
Flat earth, fake moon landing, 9/11 was an inside job...
At one point about a decade ago, not long after college, I had this conviction that over time with more available granular information about the world, people would start to be more epistemic [1] about how they viewed the world. In fact what I found though, was that more information seems to have led to the opposite. That people's interpretation of the same information seems to reinforce already held beliefs about the state of things rather than update their beliefs.
Not sure where that leads the zeitgeist with ever increasing barrage and availability of information, skewed or otherwise.
That said, every age, every transformation, has its dissidents. Counterarguments for that are Utopia and "global unity" type sentiments, but history tells us those aren't realistic goals. YMMV.
Now information barrages us from multiple outlets, in real time and at times too fast to comprehend the changes.
With this I think a large part of the population has essentially "switched off" to rational thinking, maybe an evolutionary reaction to what the brain perceives as a something that can harm us.
Like actual ATP molecules.
The world is complicated so we evolved these lumps of neurons on the ends of our spines to help navigate it. They are only as large as they have to be, and their primary purpose is to (re-)program the motor cortex and then go to sleep.
There is a strong evolutionary "pressure" to keep the brain in an "idle state".
If it seems like the evolutionary goals of the organism can be met with a simplified degenerate model then the organism will naturally adopt that model.
There is a possibility to notice that you're mostly-robotic and deliberately strive to become real but this is vanishing rare in practice.