But as those shared sources of truth and norms broke down—sometimes for good reason—the bubbles got bigger and more exclusionary in a downward spiral. If one norm was bad or if the feds lied about this one thing, then nothing is real. Baby and bathwater stuff.

No small part of that, I posit, is that critical thinking was never part of our formal education. Those of us lucky enough to have picked it up at home, at school, or in books were able to separate good info from bad, instead of simply drinking from the trusted firehoses we have based on heuristics.

Learn from parents, teachers, religious and secular leaders. Memorize and do as told. A lot grew up questioning some of those sources as they saw incongruities of what was being imparted. But not everyone. And not all sources.

What we have is a society that depends on indoctrination and (blind) faith in the status quo in order to function, for norms and traditions to be maintained. And when said indoctrination begins to look very different depending on which bubble you're in, society begins to fracture in fundamental ways

This is why different societies around the world are so different: what we are taught and what we believe to be "normal" are not uniform. But within each country, we are never as divided, believed in such different things fundamentally, but needing to be governed by the same set of laws.