learning is incredibly hard; learning enough about a sociopolitical or cultural situation (that isn't your own) to form an educated opinion requires lots of boring work and difficult engagement.

hard work is celebrated to an extent -- mostly when it's physical labour we're talking about, or hard work put into one's job or career. but intellectual hard work is avoided by most people. worse, it's often actively shunned, mocked and put down. (see jokes about philosophy students having to learn the phrase "would you like fries with that", and so on.)

if i were to make a guess why it was so hard for us, i'd probably chalk it up to our having evolved to see patterns and agency in the world around us (this is also the reason pretty much all cultures developed theisms), such that when grass rustled nearby, we assumed a predator was about to pounce on us. such patterns and agency are simple: they are either assisting us, like the gods hopefully will after a rain dance, or trying to kill us, like lions. it's not in our nature, evolutionarily speaking, to buckle down and do some intellectual heavy lifting. physical work is good for us, and a part of our evolutionary history, but hard intellectual engagement is so far from our biology that it's uniquely difficult.

one other thing: difficult intellectual work, when it pays off with coherent, sensible, helpful ideas, means change. (because, as scarf said, if we can figure out that something is wrong, we then realise we have responsibility to fix it.) people don't like change. they don't like doing the work of changing, and they don't like things changing around them. the media, news, politics: these are all inherently conservative -- obviously some more than others -- because if they were really progressive it would mean changes of drastic magnitude, which basically nobody wants. in a country like the US, where your only political options are conservative or hyper-conservative, one weapon used by the hyper-conservative (whose policies, any thinking person can discern, make no sense) is the derision of intellectualism ("elitism") and the encouragement to take pride in ignorance (celebrating "common sense" and "gut knowledge" over rational and scientific inquiry). take a society of people all avoiding hard work where possible, who don't want the extra moral responsibility that comes with awareness of new problems, and all it takes to get them to look down on and persecute those who value learning and study is, as the joker would say, a little push.