> Critical thinking is good, but we have a system that only applies it to ideas that it doesn't like and a culture of hostility towards applying it to it's own sacred ideals.

Yes, and it makes it all the more damning, because it kinda shows we know how logic works, what standards or principles are, but for "social reasons" we can suspend that.

> Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. [..] Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

-- George Orwell

This now split up into more echo chambers, little "orthodoxies", but the sum of that is not truth either.