Once you weed out opposing viewpoints to an extreme and only surround yourself with "like-minded" colleagues, you can easily convince yourself that you're on the "right side of history" and people that don't think like you are idiots.

This is a significant modern problem in many thought fields, not the least of which is medicine, but especially Public Health Sciences (and many of the sciences in general).

After spending decades excluding those who don't think the way we want them to think, it is now assumed that the best way to reach a consensus on any topic is to just silence the dissenters. This is not just a social media problem.

Eventually, any field that does this will become ridiculous and lose all credibility, but they will think that they are all superior during the entire period of their downfall.