We are all familiar with the phrase "Ignorance is bliss". A very relevant movie refernce I can recall is The Matrix, when Morpheus offers Neo a choice to have the red pill or the blue pill.
The red pill is dangerous. It opens your eyes. It allows you to see what you could not before. Actually, the red pill shows you what you chose not to see before.
The blue pill, on the other hand, is benign. It leaves you be. You continue to live in a rut like everyone else, having to face no challenges or big problems.
Most of us are born with the blue pill in our mouth. And we are too busy with our mundane lives to take some time to think about whether there is a choice. To be fair, I don't think at least 50% of us even know about a choice. They are born in the system, live in the system and die before they get a moment to think about life.
I happened to be lucky. At an early age, I started asking questions (mostly to myself) about morality and the vagueness of it, about how religion claims things are yet nobody has seen them. About how can there be the 1000 versions of religious stories and what happens in the afterlife. If they are true, which one of them is? They can't all be true at the same time. Then I tried figuring out the answers from the books I was reading, since the people around me were equally clueless and most didn't care.
Books taught me a lot. Most things in my life that I think I have figured out have been from books. Be it Ayn Rand, George Orwell, or the freethinkers. Some of them have taught things which are wrong in my perspective, but at least they added a perspective.
Almost everyone has a definition of right and wrong, yet most do not think twice about how their definitions were constructed. It mostly so happens that they are taught this too, and they carry it to their graves.