Why People Ask Why?

The wind of change that swept across Europe in the 19th century was a consequence of the dawn of an age of enlightenment. Scientific discoveries by various scientists had ushered in new technological inventions that made the people of that era to begin to subject to serious intellectual scrutiny traditional beliefs and crude methods of doing things in a bid to understand why such beliefs and methods remained sustained. A need for change was therefore felt, ushering in a new era. Eventually, the great industrial revolution of the latter part of the 19th century (c.1760-1840) became the last thing that altered traditional thinking in the most fundamentally profound ways. For instance, the controversial theory of evolution and Darwinism was let loose by Charles Darwin in 1859, the steam engine by Thomas Newcomen in 1712, telegraph communications by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone (1837), Dynamite invented by Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist, in the 1860s, William Gutenberg's invention of the printing press came in this era in Germany, around 1440. In fact, "the quick, cheap and easy distribution of information would ultimately lead to the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, the Scientific Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution" and many more. People have continued to think and to reason since then.
Part of this is why it is becoming almost practically impossible,nowadays, for a ruler to expect that his or her followers would just do his or her biddings without knowing why. The world has changed tremendously and we now have more people who have been greatly educated to the extent that they can demand for their rights more forcefully and convincingly. People now need to know why they must do something asked of them by their rulers.
New thinking has continued to dominate our intellectual space.