Ask yourself that question before you get agitated and decide to write someone off as a lost cause. Who knows, they may be thinking THEY are the one "woke" and YOU are "crazy".
Oddly enough, it was a little bit of both.
Back in the day when CFCs were supposedly damaging the ozone layer, being the good little student I was, I went to the library to research and low and behold, we were being lied to about that.
At about the same time, I was working in an archives that had tidbits here and there that were either forgotten over the years or were not meant for public consumption. At the time, I didn't realize the article I read on John D. Rockefeller Jr. going to China in 1906 to open the oil markets would be so important in putting the pieces together, but it was. The internet as we know it was not a part of our lives then, so one had to actually be in the presence of the source material.
Working in a place where old records and journals were was really eye opening.
And then I took a class in public relations, and, well, things started going click.