I don't know if it's a question of "wising up" as much as "growing up". We vote for people we know are lying to us, or at best "not telling us everything".

Because most of us don't want to be bothered.

We have lives. We have jobs. We have shit to do.

We don't have time to be informed on top of everything else.

Being informed has a price. That's something that's rarely appreciated in social commentary. It's regarded as just one of those virtues that everyone should do.

But being informed takes time. Not everyone wants to spend their time on that project. Should we make the news hour mandatory? Have quizzes each Friday to get your weekly "good citizen" sticker?

Because of this, the distribution of information, even in a society like ours, is going to be extremely uneven. At any given time only a few people will really have a sense of what's going on.

How do you govern in that reality?

It's easy to criticize and call politicians liars. But, they operate in a very difficult environment of uneven information and uneven interest.

Governing is a HARD NON-TRIVIAL problem.

Thousands of years of effort and we still only have rough rules of thumb to guide us. We need to be better at this.