LOL, yes, you caught me. But let me expand on the idea; obviously we're talking about complex phenomena with lots of variables, and it's not as though all of humanity was once wise and rational and then something went haywire. I think it's probably a universal aspect of humanness that we prefer rationalization to rationality and that our prime motivation is self-justification, as I said.
But I do think that, historically, we are in a phase of culture where these human fallibilities have a particular form and potency. Not that I think "society is getting worse" in some sort of overall way, I don't buy those kinds of rise-and-fall narratives; but each era has its own distinctive character, and it's good to be aware of our own.
(Caveat: per forum rules, I won't discuss religion here, but fair warning, some of the authors whose work I refer to are religious, should people care to go digging and read them for yourselves).
So there's an historian named Robert Tracy MacKenzie who wrote a book called We the Fallen People, about the anthropology of America's founding generation and how that view of humanity shifted since. He argued that the Revolutionary generation that wrote the Constitution etc. had a view of human nature that was not very optimistic; civic virtue was rare and unreliable, people are basically crap whether individually and in masses, and no one could be trusted with power. So the Constitution was designed to prevent anyone from getting too much power and to pit branches of government against each other so that, even with corrupt, self-interested jerks running it, no one would become too powerful and thus the liberties of the nation would be preserved. But, he argues, around the era of Jackson there was a shift: political rhetoric started to have a vision of a virtuous American people, good-hearted ordinary folk who deserved to have their will expressed in government because of how great they were, and the obstacle to be overcome was now corrupt self-interested politicians.
As I said, people's greatest motivation is to feel justified, so this new political anthropology became the norm; politicians routinely flatter voters for what great, decent folk they are who deserve to get what they want from government (whether that's government services, or government leaving them alone). People like to hear that kind of thing. The shift accompanied a big transition in American (and thence Western) culture, from deference to populism.
Here, let me invoke Jonathan Haidt again. In The Righteous Mind, he argues that evolution hardwired into our brains (among other things) two moral sensitivities that can contradict each other. He thinks that before we reached a certain stage of tool-making, deference got bred into us as an instinctive value, to submit to the dominant male of the group. Then, when our ancestors got better at making weapons, anyone could throw a rock or stab with a spear and take out a domineering musclehead, so a new value of equality got bred into us. In a sense, every human culture since has negotiated its own path between these contradictory impulses, some elevating deference as a key value, others egalitarianism, in different combinations.
So, applying Haidt's evolutionary psychology to MacKenzie's reading of history, I would say that we took a swing in the egalitarian direction about the middle of the 19th century, and it's been snowballing ever since. I think it's been amplified all the more in the age of mass media, because the rise of mass media also gave rise to an economy of consumer capitalism. In the logic of consumerism, you should buy all these neat things because 1) they're nice and you deserve nice things, and 2) you are a unique individual and your stuff should express your own special self. (think the entire fashion industry especially for that last one - or, a little more subtly, the tourist industry). Encouraging people to believe these things about themselves encourages them to spend more money in the consumer marketplace than they would if they believed the opposite ("Fancy stuff is not for folks like me," "If I have a roof over my head and food on the table, that's all I need"). The social media world we've been talking about just puts these trends on steroids, that go back to at least the 50s - Alan Noble calls it the "burden of self-belonging," the way a drastic egalitarian individualism drives a person to anxiety and misery trying to maintain a sense of self in the terms of consumerism.
What does all this have to do with what I was saying about rationality and rationalization? This: it has never been the case that humans have been terribly rational. No one has figured out how to make us so. But in the older culture of humility, of a certain pessimism (or realism, perhaps) about human nature, you can foster a sense of deference that may be healthy. It can also be unhealthy, of course, and exploited by tyrants. But a healthy deference can express itself in saying, routinely, "I don't know much about this, so I'll yield to the people that do." And even among those who do, it can lead to a respect for institutions to mediate and create consensus, saying "I know this little piece of the complex whole, but I want to hear what my respected colleagues have to share from their respective pieces."
All the evidence is that this is what our current culture is losing; a willingness to defer to mediating communal institutions. In the burden of self-belonging, we're caught in the dilemma between being special divine sparks who are utterly sovereign in ourselves, and not knowing crap about really important questions. But our instinct is not to defer to the institutions designed for this, but to Google it - the ultimate seeming-egalitarian access to knowledge. We can always "do our own research" until we find something that reassures our sense of self-justification, rather than actually learning. It becomes impossible to actually talk to each other through our differences; instead we just find a bunch of people whose prejudices happen to match ours and batten down the hatches.
