If we can extrapolate just a little from Horkheimer and Adorno, we can say that in Western culture, people assume that nothing is as it seems to be. What I am suggesting here is a cultural appropriation of this principle of "Enlightenment", which has a very mystifying (rather than enlightening) effect on people.
Because people have become culturally accustomed to doubting their own perceptions, it is easy for suave manipulators to make good seem like evil and vice versa, so that the populace regularly votes against its own interests (and shoots itself in the foot). It seems people are just too "clever" for their own goods, always doubting what is in front of them and seems to be most apparent. The cultural logic that says nothing is ever what it actually seems to be makes it easy for things to be represented as their opposites. For, after all, if something appears good, what could be more opposite -- and hence "enlightened' -- than to expose some ostensibly "evil" underlying motivation in it? Likewise, if something actually APPEARS harmful, a feeling of suave sophistication in relation to this harmful thing might readily be obtained by seeing "good" in it.
In all, it seems that many people are addicted to this feeling of sophistication, which comes from the capacity to "see" some of the opposite characteristics in whatever comes into their view. Anything that stands out very much from the norm is likely to receive this sort of treatment. The practical results of reinterpreting various situations and events as their opposite seems to have little cultural importance in comparison to this feeling of sophistication obtained in being able to read opposite values into things. It is an addiction, an intoxication, which gives a sense of immediate transcendence of everyday reality.
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