By this I mean, organize around some single person for leadership, or in other contexts focus on a popular figure. Even societies that tend to be described as more collectively-organized/oriented tend to do this.
People are people and are as flawed as one another, so this pervasive tendency to elevate others is odd to me. It can be fun and goofy as a game, but as a more serious organizing or focal principle, it just seems extremely fragile and prone to failure (e.g. numerous groups falling into disarray at the loss of a leader/leader & their family, corruption via nepotism and the like, etc.).
Definitely. If you don’t understand how the world works, you can’t tell if someone else does either. Only experts can easily spot fake experts. And that’s exactly the trouble with things like pseudoscience and misinformation; it’s easy to fall for without the domain knowledge necessary to avoid falling for it.