This is a hard task, you need cognitive resources (which means you have enough sleep, food, resilience, mental energy and a stress-free environment) and a lot of time and it's also very demanding to doubt essential beliefs about oneself and ones' own values.
So I don't really think that most people will do it. It's just too cumbersome and frankly, they have other things to do and the current mode works for them most of the time. When it fails, something like the Nazi regime happens (for various reasons, not only due to lack of advanced metacognition), but high expectations won't help us, anyway.
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I think a good solution is to build a system which generally uses balance mechanisms to keep power divided - we can't expect all people to be highly self-aware and self-critical. Unsurprisingly, that's exactly why we use democracies. Unfortunately, those systems stop to work when the majority of people lack advanced metacognition or don't have the required cognitive resources or lack information and understanding. Unfortunately, this can happen pretty fast.
The problem comes in when people take a positive stance against ever trusting the use of reason. Where they see someone stepping back, and dealing with a topic dispassionately, and alarm bells start going off. They immediately distrust the person, and if their conclusions contradict the gut intuitive reaction they have to a topic, they will side with the intuitive reaction. The 'intuitive reaction' of human brains is essentially documented in any comprehensive list of common logical fallacies. They were things we feel ought to be true, but we know are not. Things like a terrible person can't make good points, if a person is wrong about one thing they must be wrong about others, if things happened close together spatially or temporally they must be causally connected, if something is natural it must be better than artificial, etc. At that point, it doesn't matter if anyone in the group is practicing metacognition and solid reasoning, because they will be actively resisted for precisely that.
Societies view of intellectualism changes on the scale of centuries. It was at a height before World War I, almost to the point of fanaticism. It made people willing to believe that science and reason would usher in a utopia by default, because it was not capable of doing otherwise. Then, mustard gas rolled down hillsides into trenches. Mechanized tanks crawled battlefields. The creations of science were used to wreak the most horrible suffering, and society paused at that. By the time the concentration camps were unveiled after the end of the eugenics (all widely accepted as true and reasonable by the scientific community of the time), the horror wasn't new. And the 20th century kept the hits on coming, with tragedy after tragedy laid at the feet of science and reason. We may know now that all of those people made critical errors and overreached with hubris or were outright corrupt, but that doesn't matter terribly much to the person who never understood it well to begin with. All they know is that it's not a sure thing, and it can lead to stupendous tragedy. The tragedies born by anti-intellectualism, such as Pol Pots purging of intellectuals, Maos similar practices that resulted in profound starvation and the deaths of millions, couldn't get much airtime in the face of society shrinking away from reason.
I don't think this is a simple problem. In fact, I have often referred to it as the single biggest problem facing the human species. Civilization includes its own undoing. At the beginning, lethal danger, famine, disease, and other terrors of the past make people willing to try anything - even dispassionate reason. And then they build a civilization. Whose primary, if not sole, goal is to remove danger from the lives of as many as possible. This must, absolutely must, include removing the dangers which motivated the willingness to reason and ignore intuition. Given enough time, arguing for expansion of the infrastructure of civilization becomes harder. Given more time, arguing for maintenance of the existing infrastructure becomes harder. People revert to relying on intuition if for no other reason than it is easier and no longer bears many negative consequences. And when the infrastructure begins to fail, and danger re-asserts itself, it is naive to think people would see the error of their ways and return to reason. There is no historical basis for such a hope. The mother whose unvaccinated child dies of measles does not blame herself. No, they will blame not having gone far enough. They will blame what remains of the infrastructure, and call for it to be dismantled. And they will continue until humanity returns to its 'default state' of slogging through the mud, racked with disease, starving, killing each other over whose god is stronger.
Then your response has to be to adapt. Wrap some emotional frame around your reasoning and people will listen to your position because you speak their language. This doesn't help in the greater picture, but can help in individual interactions with anti-intellectual people.
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> People revert to relying on intuition if for no other reason than it is easier and no longer bears many negative consequences.
I like the analysis. Pretty dark, but I agree with it. The fragility of civilization is often attributed to the interconnectedness and interdependencies, but the psychological implications are often overlooked.
Although I have to disagree with some parts: I don't think it's just a battle between intuition and reasoning that is the root cause for annihilation of social progress. Intellectualism and anti-intellectualism both produced horrible and positive things in the past. I don't think that both approaches are entirely right and that every generation has to find a dualistic point of view which combines intuition and reasoning into a framework that deals with emotions but also solves problems rationally. I've got the feeling that you see intuition and emotional aspects as entirely negative (Mao, unvaccinated children, killing each other over whose god is stronger, ...).
This is the problem... a person who values reason would see that 'emotional frame' as the most disgusting, base, unethical kind of manipulation. Sure, you could violate everything you believe and coerce people by manipulating them emotionally... but if others figure out what you are doing, they will realize you as a hypocrite and be even less likely to consider your viewpoint.
>Pretty dark, but I agree with it.
Oh, I left out the dark parts. The dark parts come when you start asking yourself 'how can we fix or avoid this problem?' I've been considering the problem for many years, and the only ideas I have ever been able to think of are stupendously unethical and would debase whatever society used them.
>I've got the feeling that you see intuition and emotional aspects as entirely negative (Mao, unvaccinated children, killing each other over whose god is stronger, ...).
I do not, actually. Emotion and intuition are important parts of human life, and an integrated view is key. We even have support for this in biology. There are people (maybe just one person, I can only recall reading about one case) who have a lesion in a very specific part of the brain which essentially destroys their ability to experience emotion. One of the surprising things found was that this also affected their ability to reason. Specifically, they could consider an argument and produce a list of 'pros' and 'cons' for choices, but no matter how lopsided the lists are, they're incapable of deciding upon a course of action. Utterly and completely incapable of making the leap from argument to decision. So you simply can't function without emotion coming in to play.
The reason intellectualism is the right path (and by that I mean relying on reason and science in situations where the matters are important) is that it can integrate all of this, it can recognize its own shortcomings, and it can formulate ways of dealing with them. All of the tragedies of the past can usually be traced back to someone (or groups) who had all of the tools available to them which could have said "you do not have the evidence to support your conclusion", but they let other motivations sway them from rigor. Total rigor is impossible, of course. We will always have limited information. Acknowledging this, and being circumspect and conservative in our actions, building in the ability to turn back, is something only intellectualism can do.
I do not and would not advocate a 'Vulcan' emotionless outlook. We are human, and we have emotion. It's not inherently destructive. However, our emotional capacity is an outgrowth of the functioning of our brain which evolved to keep us alive (just) while living in small tightknit tribes on the African savannah. It did not adapt to function in anything like the environments in which we find ourselves today. As such, it is often misleading. The silver lining is that whether it is or is not misleading is something that reason can determine. If our emotional responses are consistent with reality, great, reason will verify that and give us confidence. If not, reason can enable us to correct ourselves. As emotion is a trained response, enough repeated correction results in this not always being a 'battle'.
