I hope you understand that this post is toxic cathartic venting.

Pollution is a problem and people know it's a problem.
Politicians come in to capitalize on that problem and seize power.
Trusting the politician doesn't make one an idiot.
The entire system is designed to work.
If it didn't work they'd just change it to a strategy that worked.

The constant false equivalence between trust and intelligence is an alarming trend that plays right into the left vs right dichotomy and allows politicians to seize even more power. I hope you can see that this attitude is very much part of the problem. Anyone running around like, "Oh you believe XYZ, well then you must be a fucking moron!" is part of the problem. It is not possible for one person to know very much.

Every person has a limited scope. All of society is completely founded on being required to trust other people. When that trust gets exploited for personal gain it doesn't make people stupid: it makes them victims of the very system they depend on to survive. To expect people to snap out of the brainwashing that they've been indoctrinated in since birth is not a reasonable expectation. The only way to dig our way out of this shithole is to create something better, and thus far no one in the world has succeeded in achieving that goal. I mean obviously we are trying but progress is slow and hindered by the very people that are threatened by a new system... so that's fun.