Without directly addressing how we got here, I think the first insight is to realize that the world is not how we always very reasonably assumed that it was.

To illustrate, take the example of language skills. Just in everyday interactions (and assuming you're in an English-speaking country), virtually everyone is conversant on a similar level in English. You have to encounter a foreigner who is a beginner speaker or a retarded person before you take note of the difficulties they have.

But if you're old enough to remember the advent of email, we all got a peek for the first time into everyone's written skills. Good Lord, it turned out many people are literally barely literate! They have difficulty structuring a sentence, let alone a paragraph or a full argument. And now with the advent of texting and tweeting it has managed to degrade significantly further.

This is all a long route to saying that to figure out what the hell is going on with anything in the world, we have to closely examine where we might have gone wrong in our own thinking. (And what's funny in the current context is that this is something I have yet to witness a Flat Earther doing.)