> we, as humans, really like a simpler world

It isn't that we "like" a simpler world, it's that we need a simpler world. We have to feed ourselves and keep a roof over our heads, therefore we don't have time to become independent experts on every subject. Even worse, because of Dunning-Kreuger, we often find ourselves with the strongest opinions on the things we don't realize we understand the least about.

And because of the particular set of values we've decided to define as the core of our society and as the motivators of all useful progress, we demand that everyone become a predator. Every source of information is actively trying to deceive you in order to make more money. This is what we can't survive. We did not evolve to constantly deal within an environment filled with trickery, with people engineering their communications with you to exploit your ignorance and desire to trust.

"Trust the Science" is just another way to say "trust us." "Trust us" worked (at least in the US) on white guys, if not anyone else (and it didn't matter whether anyone else bought into it.) It's not working on them any more, because white guys have gradually lost position while going in and out of cycles of trust in authority. And because the institutions are filled with predators working purely looking out for themselves, with no overarching ideals. At least the protection of white men (or judeo-christian western states' rights civilization, or whatever euphemism is current) is a value, and offers stability compared to the solipsistic nothing offered by pure liberalism.

White guys have come to the conclusion that institutions aren't working for them anymore, even though it's really only their working class that has lost material ground; their managers and and millionaire gentry are upset because they've lost the respect they were used to. This is where everyone else already was - others never believed that institutions were working for them.

The only people left to "trust the science" are the professionals who create it, and who have mates, children and parents who create it. "Trusting the science" is the best indicator that you're upper-middle class that there is. It's the conservative position of comfortable people who only trust institutions because they populate them. Either 1) their trust lives in a strange Gell-Mann amnesia bubble where they know that their own workplaces are corrupt, and they know their own employment is to come up with and execute strategies to deceive people, but somehow think that other institutions are different, or 2) they've decided that since they're good people, the things that they are doing must be good.

They keep airing a particular commercial about covid vaccination where they keep cutting between random doctors who repeat "trust us" over and over again like a hypnotic mantra. I don't know anyone who trusts doctors. Right now, the people in charge are the people who do; they trust doctors like white townies from sundown towns and segregated cities love cops. They identify with them. They don't trust because of their independent research into the validity of the scientific consensus, they trust because of their cultural and class affinity. They trust because they want to be doctors, or marry doctors, or could imagine their kids growing up to be doctors.

People who see that as out of reach, don't.

Sorry for rambling on. It's just that the alternative to "trusting the science" is no good either. It's tribalism all the way down, and for you too, because you're eventually going to have to trust someone.