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Splendid feature in Wired by Amy Wallace on the movement to skip childhood vaccinations:

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new
phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri
Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science
flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is,
and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades
later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion:
Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to
offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems
address real human needs that are not being met by our society,”
Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation,
channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied
medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the
rest of the human community.”

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly.
Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to
avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make
perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten
back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the
irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let
down our guard.

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