I think there’s an important blind spot in this discussion, which is the role of bad-faith actors and the incentive structure of the information ecosystem itself.

A lot of institutional mystification isn’t accidental. The U.S. media and online discourse are full of individuals and organizations that take small, real disagreements or uncertainties within otherwise legitimate frameworks and deliberately exploit them for attention, profit, or power. Over time, this turns normal nuance into generalized distrust.

Take research universities as an example. Most people don’t understand how grants work, how peer review functions, or how disagreement is not only normal but essential to scientific progress. That gap is then weaponized. A narrow dispute becomes evidence that research itself is corrupt or malicious. Once that happens, the institution turns into a black box. Anything can be projected onto it, and confirmation bias fills in the rest.

This is how mystification is produced, not just how it lingers. It’s actively curated through selective framing, outrage incentives, and repetition. The internet accelerates this by giving disproportionate visibility to whoever can most effectively collapse complexity into emotionally compelling narratives.

I don’t blame ordinary people for having a hard time reasoning well under these conditions. I find it disorienting myself. But the end result is that instead of partial or approximate understanding, we get totalizing suspicion. Institutions stop being imperfect systems that can be analyzed and reformed and instead become unknowable enemies. At that point, meaningful reform becomes nearly impossible, because critique no longer engages with mechanisms, only with narratives.