It honestly doesn't seem like the vast majority of the human population can handle the truth. They simply don't look for it. Their objective is to reinforce their existing worldview with comfortable thoughts, completely independently of the truth.
It's a very strongly built in bias that completely screws over us as a species as far as making progress towards actual knowledge. As far as I can tell it has absolutely nothing to do with being civilized. That's just the difference between ignorance and willful ignorance.