@Allamanda Because it is not native to us, and yet is generally not taught to every school child, even at the most basic level. In the US part of the reason that doesn't happen is it results in uncomfortable and threatening questions to religious parents, from their children.

Natural selection has taught us to run first and ask questions later. To make snap judgments and then be resistant to evidence against those judgments. To assume difference is a threat. To see agency where it might possibly exist rather than where it actually, demonstrably does. All of these primal tendencies were a survival advantage when we were tribal hunter-gatherers and the primary threats were rival tribes and stalking predators. Now they must be overridden if we are to move forward in civil, urban, technological society.

@Allamanda I don't really claim to know, but I'd be unsurprised to find that it's largely because of the outsized influence of fundamentalist Christianity and various domino effects from that group's aggressive entrance into national politics starting in the 1980s. That, and our failure as a nation to own up to our collective shadow ... we are still in denial about slavery, Jim Crow, the treatment of Native Americans, Japanese Americans, and more -- leading to unresolved inequalities of the present, including immigrants and LGBTQ persons, etc. The need to justify the unjustifiable encourages the production and uncritical consumption of bullshit (not just untruth, which is at least vaguely tethered to reality). Add to this that we not only have the intersection of these two influences, but for the most part, fundamentalism has literally become the intersection and is used to justify it.