I'm not the other poster, and this isn't my theory - but for people like Adorno or Hegel the go-to explanation for this phenomenon is basically that reasoning in our society is ends-rational. We're very good at considering ideas insofar as they relate to a goal - for instance, the geometry of transistors in relation to their performance. That's because we're a culture of employees - and in such a culture, you don't need to think about goals, just about means.
This kind of thought process is pretty toxic to critical thinking and examination of ideas, since the most central elements (our goals) are almost entirely unexamined - and we don't really include their examination in our education, since we're only interested in preparing children to be good 'problem solvers', or in other words, employees.
