That's because you can opt out of news media. Which in turn is why they coopt schools and colleges, out of which you can hardly opt out.
Discussion
I believe that among a minority of people, reality always speaks much louder than teachers and news media. And reality can be discerned or cognized from prior knowledge and principles even if not directly taught.
So my hope is that within every cult, within every brainwashed group, some people (like Neo in the matrix) are born who can see through the bullshit and escape and/or better yet, work to turn their society back towards reality. Many of us who grew up in church-cults and escaped know that bat-shit-crazy-dogma just doesn't stick in the clear minds of smart people where reality purifies.
And it is much easier when there is a counter-culture to escape to, people who sow the seeds of doubt.
The sad thing is how many people never escape, never wake up, and the years of waste believing in dumb ideas that get you nowhere.
The said thing is, In the case of America, the generations of inner city black kids who continue to live through horrible circumstances because the current dogma misdiagnoses the problem and shames anybody who points that out [for example]. Or here in New Zealand, where the race issue is thick, where Maori are much worse off than they were in the 1980s and yet they blame it on colonialism which (let me quickly check, ah yes) happened before the 1980s.
My point is just that we won't all drink the kool-aid.
Talking points, in my view, are just things government officials do to seem like they are doing something, and staying relevant.
In reality, they don’t understand complex or domain specific topics, don’t give meaningful insights, and don’t actually achieve much more than some self promotional media attention.
Then next election or promotion time, their name has better public familiarity and they seem like they mattered - they didn’t, haven’t and won’t.
Tell me about escaping dogma and brainwashing -- I am a highly "educated" southern European.
Meaning, from age 2 until well over my twenties I was immersed in a constant bombardement of communist indoctrination of all colors - from the orthodox marxism of my Catholic highschool teachers to the slick post-Soviet Euro-social-democracy" (with its neo-Keynesian/marxist backbone intact) of my post-grade school professors.
And yet, I turned out a hard-core anarchist xD
I believe we have genetic social-survival strategies. Richard Dawkins wrote about Evolutionary Stable States (ESS) where some percentage of the population being a certain way becomes stable, and if that percentage tips, that creates the pressure driving the percentage back.
I believe there is a large percentage of people born with the 'Follow the largest pack' strategy, and no matter how irrational that pack becomes, that is their survival strategy and deep endemic fear prevents them from leaving the pack. They are sheep.
You and I were not born with that strategy.
Similarly if the population of free thinkers gets too low, or too high, some kind of pressure brings it back to the stable level. I'm not sure everyone being a free thinker would work out well. But without us, the pack has no corrective force.
Ah, yes, I read the Selfish Gene a long, long time ago, and then the God Delusion.
Applied here though, my first instinct when I read something like what you just wrote is to look for an external answer. I.e., a "nurture" explanation, as opposed to what I think you characterize as a "nature" explanation.
But to be honest, if I reflect on my own anecdotal case, I really was like that all the way as far as I can remember as a little kid. So perhaps you're right and there's a "wiring" aspect to it that would make Dawkin's ESS applicable here too.
