Agreed, the state exacts a heavy price for knowing - and especially speaking - the truth about it. And often it's the everyday people who have swallowed its propaganda who act as enforcers and dole out the social punishments for not going along with their fables. An exploitation of the instinct to not undermine the foundational narratives of the tribe for fear of being outcast and dying alone in the wilderness.
re: those who should know better, yes it has been revealing. Easy to strike an anti-establishment pose (especially anonymously on the internet!) when there are no real consequences for doing so, but when the heat picks up around a particular issue, the msm turns its sauron eye onto it and they start pushing all the fear buttons and other tactics of psychological manipulation, then you find out what people are really made of. Not that I aquitted myself particularly well during covid - mostly it turns out that IRL I'm a yes-man who politely goes along to get along and doesn't want to rock the boat. It was mandates that did it for me and the coercion of having your job depend on submitting to the jab that was the final straw and engaged a refusal that led to getting fired (though my partner held the firmest line on that).
Ran Prieur said something a while back about 9/11 'truthers' which stuck with me, roughly: the biggest predictor of acceptance of 'conspiracy theories' around the 9/11 attacks was class. It had little to do with the persuasiveness of the various arguments and more to do with the social consequences of adopting a contrary view on a subject deemed to be Verboten by the establishment. If you were invested in, and had further realistic aspirations in, the system those weren't ideas if was permitted to entertain. If, on the other hand, the system had already let you down, kicked you in the teeth and wasn't even pretending to offer you anything, then there were no barriers in the way of adopting those contrarian narratives, and they might even be attractive.
Again, rational evaluation of the strengths of the various arguments mostly didn't come into it at all. At some point I think most people decided if a contrarian stance was 'for them' or not, depending on whether they were likely to feel any real life consequences for adopting it. I know that I rejected most of the 9/11 truth arguments without investigating them in any real depth. On the old MLMB I would glaze over and click away when the subject came up - maybe the same kind of 'boredom' that Caitlin Johnstone admitted to wrt covid debates? - https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/07/16/every-billionaire-is-a-predator-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/ Maybe it's not even rejecting the arguments that is important from the propagandist's point of view, but the visceral understanding that the topic is radioactive and you're not even supposed to engage with it, but just sort of skate lightheartedly over the surface before moving onto another topic?
Agreed about collapse being the only real solution to this whole clusterf*&%. Though as you say that's going to be a complete nightmare for millions of people too, though not everyone around the planet by any means. I just read James Scott's 'Against the Grain' where he repeatedly makes the point that the collapse of past civilisations probably led to a huge increase in the quality of life for the actual people who lived under those systems, and its only an archaeological bias towards exciting artefacts (probably coupled with a degree of denial about surviving without our own abusive culture) that leads people to imagine the 'dark ages' between civilisations as unimaginably horrible, rather than a reversion to simpler non-state ways of life that were rather more pleasant for the average person. Probably things will be worse in some ways for a collapse that spans the whole world, but I think the same principle will apply, especially over time as it becomes possible to build better, more human-scale societies from the rubble of late stage capitalism. That's the hope, anyway!