This can be controversial, but my opinion is that religious education normally is the opposite of critical thinking. If you teach the kids to accept beliefs just based on faith, you're killing critical thinking.

No one, including you, is immune to propaganda.

Decision fatigue is a real thing. Ask anyone who sat through three tests in one day; even if you have studied the material, it's hard to focus after a while. It's easy to fill our day with minutia that distracts us from the impostant issues.

Critical thinking is a skill that requires teaching and practice. If children are not given that preparation they won't have that skill in adulthood. That's why authoritarian governments care so much about controlling and/or limiting access to proper education.

I find way too many people talking about "common sense" as if that was even a thing. It frustrates me to no end.

Something like host over half of all Americans cannot read above a 5th grade level. Almost a third are functionally illiterate.

It’s not that they don’t have critical thinking skills. It’s that the entire lower-90% have been so badly nerfed that it is increasingly difficult for anyone in that cohort to get to a point where they can educate themselves without copious assistance.

And that’s exactly how Republicans prefer the population - uneducated, illiterate, ignorant and gullible. The better with which to scam them for their votes.

People focus their energies on getting through the day for the most part of their lives. It is very hard for people to muster the time and energy to paying attention to politics, let alone ideologically political propaganda.

The vast majority flat ignore it entirely and remain in an apolitical state. This is a primary function of propaganda: insulating people from political action or thought that might alter the status quo.

Many of the United States have removed teaching critical thinking from their curriculum.

I think this USSR quote is a good answer:

We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.

(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

In any authoritarian system where indoctrination starts young you'll probably have a fifth of the population that's high on the coolaid or never questioned anything due to ideology or intelligence (or both). The rest know they're lying, etc. And keep their mouths shut because they don't want to go to Siberia or El Salvador.

I was idly thinking about this the other day, how absolutely lonely it must be in say North Korea, where if you're caught by the regime to be thinking the wrong thing you'll get killed. I'd know its bullshit, but I'd be terrified of speaking out or asking questions, incase the person I'm speaking to is an agent of the state, or will suspect me of being an agent and inform the authorities incase I'm testing them.

It must be awful not knowing who's a secret police, who's a gullible rube for buying the propaganda and who's just hiding behind forced conformity.

I don't think many of them will believe the propaganda, but I bet the ones who do will be the happiest. Or least miserable I guess.

Do people in authoritarian countries actually just eat the propaganda? To what extent do they believe the propaganda?

Where I come from? Not much, but part of that is because the lies are so obvious and in conflict with people's lived experience that you can't even delude yourself into accepting them.

Critical thinking has been an increasingly rare skill, partially because people are focusing on conspiracy theories instead.

Critical thinking has to be taught in order for a person have it. And when you either restrict/limit education (for example, making it so that one needs a lot of money for proper schooling, thus barring lower classes from getting the education they need) or alter the education to become indoctrination. (These methods are most efficient combined!) It's why authoritarian people and parties want to control and/or destroy education systems so bad.

Being a history nerd, I've been convinced that the vast majority of people can be tricked into believing nearly anything. No one is immune to propaganda, it's just a matter of circumistances and the education you receive.

If you had grew up in a society where everyone told you that, say, pigs are a type of lizard, and your school taught you that pigs are lizards, all biologists were bribed or forced into saying pigs are lizards, and all the books you read and all the movies or shows you watched said pigs are lizards, chances are that you would believe pigs are lizards.

I'd also like to note that the above scenario would work especially well if you had never actually spent time with pigs. For example, it's a lot easier to convince someone that gay people are evil if they don't personally know any gay people.

I also think that often people know that, for example, elections are fraudulent, but they are too scared to say anything and thus act like they aren't.

Seriously, if you are AWARE of propaganda, you are also aware that you have been influenced by it. Propaganda is pervasive in civilizations. It is simply manipulation. TV ads and guys trying to pick up chicks are everyday uses of propaganda.

I've recently gotten into BP debating and it teaches you a palette of skills useful in seeing through propaganda. (Seeing nuance in bad things, playing devil's advocate, narrowing down disputes to very specific points of contention, explaining things with chains of cause and effect, putting facts into perspective, making sure to explicitly define words, ...) I wish more people tried it – it would raise the quality of discourse in society so much.