Some time ago, my country decided to trust the social norm rather than the thing in itself. And I think that was a mistake. There is a solid philosophical grounding for it in pragmatism and the frantic attempts to get a grip on the mind after the waves of speculative idealism passed. (German transcendentalism was seriously discussed as a threat to the republic in some of the legal scholarship of the late 19th c.) And trusting in the alethic aspect of the social norm at the cost of the truth of the idea might be at the root of the present political unrest. (Though both factions in that unrest are very deeply rooted in the state. The list of establishment backers of the present administration is long and deep.)
This isn't just an abstract political idea. It's how life is conducted, from the deciding of political questions to deciding which server at the neighborhood fast-casual restaurant gets enough shift hours to pay the rent. The trust isn't in principles, but in the prevailing social norms. And these norms are associated with powerful industrial mechanisms of wealth creation, yes, but there is a problem if a society has informally decided to dispense with the notion of truth. The cash value of the thought, to use William James' expression, is that those who focus on the idea are sidelined, and eventually excluded from the game, whether it be cooking hash browns, studying law, making theatre, or studying at the university. And since the game is coterminous with social existence, there's no home to go to then. Importantly, the reason the society does this is that it genuinely believes that the social practice leads to a more truthful answer than the idea. And they're wrong about that.
Some fraction of the population would suffice to populate the corporate mechanisms of wealth creation that form the visible fabric of social existence in the both the West and the East. What all involved might be slowly coming to understand, as the political mechanisms begin to fray and fragment, is that the ability to populate these functioning mechanisms leaves unanswered the question of whether the social form shaped by these norms is a just society. And that questions posed by ideas can linger longer than the ideas themselves.