I've heard Hilde Domin say something similar in an interview I listened to yesterday, paraphrased: "When you're young, you can still act on your insights [in this case, leaving Germany because of the rise of Hitler], but older people have more relations/commitments; and in fact many people don't even want insights, that's sadly true."
It came to mind because people can be very defensive and petty even when no salary and no danger is involved... just because we believed X for Y number of years and somehow identified with it. So in that sense critical thought is like democracy, we mostly pay lip service to it, while trying our best to restrict it where it is inconvenient for us personally (or our masters, depending on how much we internalized that).
That reminds me of an interview with John Cleese where he said something along the lines of "I don't laugh as much as I used to. As I get older, I find that I'm coming across fewer and fewer novel jokes, novelty (to the listener) being a critical part of making things funny."
Getting old means you've seen lots of things. If all those things have created a consistent mental model, it's much easier to ignore the one, new outlier that contradicts the rest.
It came to mind because people can be very defensive and petty even when no salary and no danger is involved... just because we believed X for Y number of years and somehow identified with it. So in that sense critical thought is like democracy, we mostly pay lip service to it, while trying our best to restrict it where it is inconvenient for us personally (or our masters, depending on how much we internalized that).