Today I will provide a simplified – perhaps oversimplified – outline of how and why highly-intelligent modern people actively cooperate with the most outlandish evil in the spirit of going along to get along.
Consciousness – as awareness of being -- serves to guide and focus intelligence – functional thinking and doing. The quality of awareness within consciousness determines the quality of functional thinking and doing.
In terms of awareness, a despiritualized consciousness deadened by atheism, materialism, reductionism, and positivism will rarely, if ever, guide intelligence above the level of responding exclusively to external forces and stimuli. Intelligence guided by a despiritualized consciousness becomes an enslaved extension of the external and objectified world.
Since the consciousness guiding intelligence has ejected the innate spiritual nature of being into the external world, the intelligence it guides loses all sense of spiritual freedom and resorts to functioning/problem-solving purely within the confines of the unfree world into which consciousness has trapped it.
Intelligence guided by despiritualized consciousness responds primarily to externally-induced fear and desire, and it inevitably limits its solutions to fear-and-desire problems to functional considerations involving this-worldly conformity, security, and acceptance.
Additional note: Although a spiritualized consciousness has the potential to offer some protection, it can still succumb to the very same external forces that enslave a despiritualized consciousness. When it comes to spiritualized consciousness, much depends on quality and depth.