Peoples' understanding of the world around them is substantially a matter of their explanatory models - to the point that experience and observations are essentially ignored.
For example, there is a model for how "democracy" works; then there is what actually happens. And people continue, decade after decade, to believe in the theory rather than their observations and experiences of what actually happens.
Same with laws and regulations: there is a model of what these are supposed to be aiming at, and are observations concerning how the law/rule is actually deployed in practice - which may be very different indeed, and yet the law/rule continues (usually successfully!) to be defended on the basis of the theoretical model.
Likewise with technology: there is the explanatory model of how some bit of technology is supposed to work - and then there are our observations about what it actually does... From which may sometimes be inferred that the bit-of-kit is not, and never was - and never could, be working in the manner of the model. "AI" is a topical instance of this.
Another example from medicine, is that once a drug has been marketed as an "anti-depressant", then people (doctors as well as patients) cannot seem grasp that drug's thus classified can and do cause depression (and suicide) in some patients.
The consequences of the Birdemic lockdowns and peck were another example of the same phenomenon - most people believed that theory that these "would help"; and apparently could not grasp that they would inevitably cause harm - even if they also helped (which, in the event, they did not).
But these are just specific examples: this way of thinking permeates our lives right down to the deepest levels. Consider ideologies such as feminism: people still talk about feminism as if it was 1880, and this was a new theory that "must work" and is intrinsically A Good Thing. A century and a half of actual personal experiences makes no apparent difference. (The same applies by close analogy to socialism or racism.)
Religions are the same as ideology in this respect. Once a model-of-realty of a religion is accepted; nothing could ever happen that would necessarily refute it.
And the same applies to people (like the recent New Atheists) who talk about the liberation of mankind from religion as if this was a new, untried theory of human happiness - that must surely work! When in actuality we already live (as did our parent, grandparents and back) in the least religious society in the history of the world, and it is continually getting less religious
We are back at that old favourite theme upon which I repeatedly harp: that metaphysics is prior to science; that theory is prior to experiment etc.
This just is the reality of human existence.
Totalitarian controllers are far more concerned about controlling the theoretical models by which we interpret the world, than they are about controlling specific "information" - because once the models are established, they cannot be refuted by any new information.
Once someone has assumed that there is no God and this is a purposeless and meaningless universe; nothing can ever happen to compel him to recognize the reality of God, purpose or meaning - everything possible can be explained away as random, the product of delusion or fraud - and so forth.
Once somebody has decided that their church is blessed by God and can never be corrupted and will last until the end of time/ Last Judgment - then no amount of corruption or evil done by that church and/or its members will make any difference to the assumption.
The lesson I draw from this is that we should be very careful what we assume!
Because upon our theoretical models of reality depend our experience of reality.
And we can only learn that which is learnable within the context of our assumptions.
Therefore; we ought, as a minimum, to become (as far as possible - which can only be known by sustained trying) explicitly aware of our own assumptions - of those "models" by which we understand and explain reality.
