Frank Herbert would say no to people that never reached past concrete thought and didn't hit abstract thought and just live their life with animal instincts and never critically self examine what they do and think.

It’s interesting for certain. I will end up in a discussion with down-with-the-government coworkers who twist themselves into knots to align themselves with pre-approved Republican stances. What do you mean you don’t care about birth gender markers causing passport issues for trans people, how are you okay with the concept of paying for a chance at a passport in the first place when you think licenses and car inspections are overreach and restrict your right to travel? But I think today’s work-life balance and in particular the employer standard of ‘owning your time’ that occurred in the Industrial Revolution calls for a certain level of turning off your brain.

Who knows though. There’s a lot of archaeological and anthropological evidence that shows people in prehistoric times did a lot of thinking on their morality, on governance, on how society should be formed. But it’s harder to quantify how many of them were tuned in and how many were just going through the motions like modern times.

In my experience, the majority of people are simply reacting to outside stimulation, then reasoning and justifying their actions after the fact.

Agreed!

I used to theorize that some people lacked self-awareness, which I defined as the primary characteristic of a conscious entity. People thought I was being pretentious.