"The Great Unthinking Mass" aka USA

Just recently we completed a worksheet on our reading. One of these readings was Immanuel Kant's "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" This was a response to the question posed by Prussian official Reverend Johann Friedrich Zollner a year before this essay.
This essay by Kant explains that people do not achieve enlightenment not because they lack intellegence but because they lack the courage to work off their own intellect without the guidance of another. Kant says, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude!" (Dare to know) (Kant)

Dare to know is Kant's motto for enlightenment. He continues on this subject and explains that many don't attain enlightenment because of laziness and because they have become too fond of their state of not thinking for themselves. Not thinking for yourself in todays society is very easy with all the rules, regulations, and people to tell you what to do. He uses the example of the guardians explaining how straying away from these regulations alone is dangerous, Kant feels differently. He felt that the people struggling for enlightenment would fall a few times, but learn how to walk after a couple tries. The idea of falling usually keeps the timid and immature from trying again, never learning how to walk.

Kant felt a huge part of this enlightenment was the separation of church and state. If the church is kept out of stately affairs it may be easier for people to stop relying on their guardians to make their decisions for them. If there was no church impeding on people's lives and thinking, there is no telling what new ideas could have come about.

If people in our society today actually thought for themselves instead of listening to everything the media, the government, and churches had to say, we may have a more mature nation. In the past there has been many horrible catastrophes just because the people following orders didn't think with their own intellect. The Holocaust is an example for this, had the Nazi soldiers listened to their own knowledge and not take orders from above, things could have been drastically different.

As I look back into my own past, I remember events that would have played out for the better had I not followed others and relied on my own knowledge. Has there been a time where you feel you should have used the courage to follow your own intellect?
Is our society really at the maturity level we want? How far has our society set itself back from being enlightened?