"If we all"

You're right, it's easy for solutions to exist when everyone is unified. And in the past it was pretty easy. The nation state/religion you lived in pretty much exterminated anyone that disagreed.

So, I guess my question is, "Is there a way forward without massive amounts of death and suffering"

Freedom of thought means dissent. Dissent means there are others who you want to convince that your point of view is more correct. You can do this through honest means or you can do it through misinformation, which currently is a lot cheaper. Think about the amount of money we have to spend to convince people COVID is real vs how much YouTube pundits spend to convince people otherwise.

So the only real solution will be economic: make lies expensive. But by definition lies are easier to manufacture than the truth. Opinions are cheaper than research. And passion tends to be more believable than things people have to read and math they have to check for themselves. You could make the cost social: spread lies, get permanently labeled as a liar and never be able to show your face anywhere again. Can work ok for public figures but less so for /u/QAnon123. You can do it through law: spread lies and go to prison (fines are only punishment for those that don’t have a lot of money). Or you could do it with cruel and unusual punishment so much so that it makes it so taboo that enforcement happens like four times a century. But in either case you will have some death and suffering because someone will be collateral damage.

Yes. This is a big part of the problem: lying is almost free and spreading the truth is relatively costly. As the old adage has it "by the time the truth has put on its boots a lie will be halfway around the world". There is another analogy too: destruction is much cheaper than construction.

The offsetting factor with destruction is that you rarely want to just destroy something. Destruction for the sake of itself is really kind of rare on a large scale. Usually we do it so we can build something different where the old thing was: a new government, a new building, a new way of thinking, whatever. And at that point it’s often times easier to avoid total destruction and instead just do more precise application of force. A revolution is destruction in a way but there is a reason why revolutionists always try to take over existing government structures (physical and ideological): it is cheaper to declare yourself president or king or whatever than to create a nation from scratch.

If we look at it that way, you can’t keep lying forever, right? At some point you either become North Korea or the USSR and try to hide behind the iron curtain, which is nearly impossible in today’s interconnected world, or you have to base your ideology on some version of the truth. Peddlers of misinformation can’t win in the long term.the question is how much damage can they do in the meantime?

The Roman Catholic Church has always supported some level of separation between church and state. They're happy to be named as an official state religion but don't want a theocracy.

That’s only because they really want to be elevated above monarchs. Check out the history of Florence and the Medici family for a great example of the kind of separation the RCC is after.

> If we were all Roman Catholics we might not need to question who won the election because there would be no elections, just clergy.

You should check out Poland.

> Kerry is too intellectual and Bush is a “salt of the earth” kind of guy.

I remember that election and for me it was nothing to do with Kerry's intellect it was that he's a pretentious, lecturing windbag.

> if people are free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some will

Yes, some will. Not enough to really matter, and I think you do more harm than good by drawing attention to it. I vote Republican but I never heard of Qanon until people on the left started talking about it.