More related to your post: I do share your epistemological concern for the truth, but most people don’t care about the truth. I’d put it even more strongly: people generally don’t draw a sharp distinction between what’s true and what they would like to believe. People are inherently irrational. When it comes to day to day activities, people exercise more rationality — because they suffer the consequences of acting without the discipline of rationality. When it comes to issues of religion and ethnic history, though, it is easier to just relax and do the natural thing by conflating what’s true and what you’d like to believe. After all, if you’re wrong in your proud belief that an Indian scientist had discovered the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics but died in an accident before he could tell anybody else, how would you ever suffer for being wrong?

I don’t think either political activity or educational curricula create this tendency, though they may well reflect and exploit such tendencies. It is possible that educational curricula could be designed to help humans overcome their irrationality. But I don’t see any obvious way of doing it — and I don’t see any incentive for anybody to figure it out.