You are describing the impact of anything not rooted in defensible truth. Nonsense has been the blight of the modern world since the dawn or critical thought. That’s ~2500 years of struggle between thinking and following.

Edit: Writing appears 3500-3000 BCE, but the first writings about reasoning/critical thought don't appear until ~500 BCE. There is no actual evidence of conflict between reasoning and believing prior to then, and that's a long period of writing without a single mention. Before the early Greek thinkers, there doesn't appear to have been much. Knowledge was scarce and reason even more so. And after the decline of Classical civilization, it was almost completely lost to the 'West' for centuries until the Greek texts were rediscovered by the Arabs. Had they not done so, many might have been lost forever.