I’m afraid, unfortunately, that it is precisely the idea that anyone could understand everything without much effort that makes people so susceptible to utter nonsense.

This also gives rise to the impression that so-called intellectual elites are nothing more than charlatans who want to pull the wool over the public’s eyes with their incomprehensible "intellectual secret language." So people end up looking to idiots who, while having not the slightest clue about the subject, explain things in a way that anyone can follow—even without knowing anything about it themselves—or at least believe they understand all the "nonsense" those snobby scientists are spouting.

In my view, this effect—which definitely exists—also clearly reveals who is primarily responsible for it: namely, the operators of the major social media platforms, all of whom are billionaires that have a genuine interest in ensuring that the masses allow themselves to be duped.

If that were not the cause, this effect would have to occur particularly among the financial elite as well, and people would be asking en masse whether their vast power might be unjustified—yet this does not seem to be the case at all among the general public.

This in turn gives rise to the schizophrenic state whose effects we are witnessing today: People distrust science, but they do not question the goals pursued, for example, by climate change deniers, who by no means came up with their narratives on their own, but are well paid to spread them as widely as possible.

I fear that this problem could only be solved by significantly reducing the influence of billionaires on public opinion—but in our system, where they wield almost unrestricted power, this unfortunately seems virtually impossible.