^^Exactly!
Truth is a luxury we indulge in when we can afford to, but it goes out the window as soon as we can't (or don't want to because it messes with our profit margins or beliefs).
Truth is secondary, a nice bonus when it doesn't cost us anything, not something people strive for, even when we say we do. We mostly just mean "a 'truth' that makes me comfortable". We want just enough to not kill ourselves (knives are sharp, fire burns, water drowns, etc.) and maintain our internal model, or in AI parlance, our hallucination of the world we live in, because even our subjective experience of the world is a lie. It's not actual reality. Colors don't exist, sound doesn't exist, it's all figments of our imagination.
You wrote:
But religion, as one example, is not by itself the problem. It's a small subset of humans manipulating core tenets to their own benefit.
It kinda is a problem if you're looking for truth. The majority of people still believe in things that have absolutely no evidence to support them. Even a lot of atheists and agnostics fall back on the notion that we humans are somehow special, that we have some spark/soul that makes us unique, when the truth, as far as the available evidence suggests at least, is that we're just complicated biological machines with some pretty good pattern matching algorithms, here through sheer dumb luck, and that there are no higher beings and the universe doesn't give a flying fuck about us. Our existence is meaningless on a very fundamental level. We're not special, but a very large number of people can't accept that, so we lie to ourselves about our very nature.
Right now you can go and have a conversation with ChatGPT that is more stimulating and interesting than many conversations you've had with people over the years (you know, morons), but
we're special, and
it is just a machine.
I'm not saying everyone should become a nihilist, but if we want a society that truly values truth then we have to start throwing out some of the things everyone takes for granted that aren't true, and I think that is a hell of a lot more things than most people care to admit, because they're pretty foundational to the society we live in.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave