> I do wonder if it leads to a modern day society where educated people are able to rationalize the indefensible, as long as it's good for whatever organization

> I do wonder if it leads to a modern day society where educated people are able to rationalize the indefensible, as long as it's good for whatever organization/bureaucracy they've aligned themselves with We have good reason to believe this has been the case since at least 500ish BCE and one may well suppose the phenomenon pre-dates that, so it seems to be more a society thing than a modern day society thing. It's probably hard to educate people to defend or promote ideas well without also enabling them to defend or promote bad ideas better than most people can do for good ones.