I think your intelligence focus is wrong focus. Look a different way:
There are a lot of problems everywhere. Who has to fix those problems?
- Some think that strong leader has to fix it (on the right).
- Others think the strong state has to fix it (on the left, I am simplifying).
- And very capable digital rights and open source community (I think) thinks that people themselves can fix it (not everyone thinks that way).
If we would convince people still have agency and can fix things, they would not support the state or leader for getting ever more control over us and fix things for us.
I would think, that problem that people don’t believe they can change things, so they ask the government to do so.
Why they don’t believe?
- Can be very busy
- Can be not interested
- Can feel incapable (like things are super complex)
- etc etc etc