Nowadays, many, maybe even most of us do not live in the world described by science, but in some kind of "Fantasyland". In his eponymous book, Kurt Andersen describes and explains how we arrived at this point. The pivotal moment, he argues, was the sixties:

"What the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same coins minted around 1967. All the ideas we call countercultural barged onto the cultural main stage in the 1960s and ’70s, it’s true, but what we don’t really register is that so did extreme Christianity, full-blown conspiracism, libertarianism, unembarrassed greed, and more. Anything goes meant anything went.
(...)

A kind of unspoken grand bargain was forged between the anti-Establishment and the Establishment. Going forward, individuals would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes, or social opprobrium. “Do your own thing” has a lot in common with “Every man for himself.” If it feels good, do it: for some that will mean smoking weed and watching porn—and for others, opposing modest gun regulation and paying yourself four hundred times what you pay your employees. (...)

The idea that finally eclipsed all competing ideas was a notion of individualism that was as old as America itself, liberty and the pursuit of happiness unbound: Believe the dream, mistrust authority, do your own thing, find your own truth. In America from the late 1960s on, equality came to mean not just that the law should treat everyone identically but that your beliefs about anything are equally as true as anyone else’s. As the principle of absolute tolerance became axiomatic in our culture and internalized as part of our psychology—
What I believe is true because I want and feel it to be true—individualism turned into rampant solipsism."