I wanted to stage that question, and also propose my own answer. I think there are a few reasons why most people are oblivious:
1) We start out as a blank slate and need to be given wisdom
- When we're born we literally know nothing, and need to be educated on how the world works. Given that the vast majority of education systems in the world aren't that great, and higher education almost always has massive entry barriers, most people are simply not exposed to wisdom, and so don't have the wisdom to.. well.. seek out more wisdom
2) The world is incredibly complex, and difficult to understand
- Have you ever tried to understand economics? It seems that a lot of economists barely understand economics. And that's just one field amongst a plethora of other fields, all with a huge number of sub-disciplines. Even if you were to dedicate all of the time you had in your life where you weren't just eating, sleeping, exercising, and going to the bathroom, to learning about a field, it might take you multiple years before you gain any type of wisdom about that field, and then you have hundreds of other disciplines left to learn
3) Many people have weak logical skills
- Not only is the world almost limitlessly complex, a vast majority of people don't seem to have the brain power necessary to map out greater frameworks about the world out of the plethora of facts that come at them. They're all smart enough to thrive, sure, but getting beyond knowing how to type, fill up a car with gas, and budget in groceries is a very slow process.
4) Caring about knowledge isn't 'normal'
- All over media we see images of sex, alcohol, whatever, but rarely do we see a nerdy guy with glasses reading a book. I don't know about anyone else, but when I was growing up I don't recall a lot of people I knew telling me they were just going to 'stay in and read' over the weekend. Everyone would have given them a pretty weird look.
5) Our ego usually takes a stance against criticism
- Ever tried to give someone advice? Sometimes it works, usually you find yourself in a defensive argument as whoever you're talking to tries to save face. What could have been a great learning moment and transfer of knowledge, becomes another person still being shrouded in darkness.
Those are a few barriers that I can think of. Is there anything else to add?
Yes. You're wrong.
The world is no much more complex than it ever was. What is definitely (increasingly) complex is modern society, i.e. it's gone up and up broadly since the beginning of tool making and the apparition of the first human language. However, this is not a problem for the species since social organisation has so far been able to adjust itself to deal with this increase in complexity.
Education as it is today may not be what most people would like for their own kids but it is still able to cope with the demands of this complex society in terms of highly skilled and specialised workers. So not really a problem either.
Most of us have broadly the same logical skills (that's my personal belief). What we don't have is the brainpower necessary to process complex processes, deal with stress and conflicting demands, and agonise over difficult moral choices. Brainpower is a physiological issue, though, not a logical one. Feed and train people properly and give them the apropriate life-style and they will demonstrate they have essentially the same logic and logical skills as the best among us.
Caring about knowledge requires brainpower too. Not an issue we wouldn't know how to solve if society really wanted to.
Ego is only a problem with people who are mentally sick, which may be just stress but also includes serious mental conditions. And of course most of the people you are talking about are precisely those with some, or even an accumulation, of mental issues.
So, if the problem was just a question of how to do it it could be solved if we wanted to. But we don't want to (collectively) and that's the real difficulty.
However, to go back to your question, human beings broadly prioritise problems depending on the problems themselves and on the resources available to them. The way the world works is way down in terms of priority for most people because they effectively have better things to do, not least attend to those problems that are closer in their environment and that they think they will be able to solve and which if solved would therefore be more likely to improve their lives more quickly. Our ancestors did just that and no more and that's why we exist at all now. Consideration for knowledge is always present but just increased in scope and extent with the more complex organisation of societies, in particular allowing intellectuals to spend their day without such anxieties as procuring food and shelter.
Society being essentially an organised body of human beings, we shouldn't wonder that people do not get to do exactly all the same things. For the time being at least, it suits society, somehow, that most people do not get to care much about knowledge and how the world works. But the same people, if they had been taken at a sufficiently young age, would have been able to do just that, possibly for some of them better than how it's done now. In essence, people are effectively reduced to being the component parts of society and it just happens that society does work with a big chunk of its population reduced to low-skilled jobs, limited and often very limited intellectual capabilities, short-span attention, low self-esteem, bad and often very bad life-style, and poor opportunities across the board. One could say that it is somewhat unfortunate that society should be able to work like this but it's a fact that it works well enough, at least for the time being, that there doesn't seem to be any real impetus to change the situation.
EB