I guess my stance is that:

1. yes, it will require a widespread shift in people's beliefs for anything to change significantly. So such a shift is necessary.

2. I also personally believe that such a widespread shift is sufficient to fix a lot of this stuff. Nobody has any recent data for this because it hasn't happened in our lifetimes, but there is plenty of further-back historical evidence for it.

3. A prerequisite for the shift to occur is for everybody to believe both (1) and (2), such that they are motivated to try.

4. Anecdotally it seems like most people really believe (1) but severely doubt (2), which unfortunately means they have no motivation, so nothing has any hope of occurring right now.

5. Therefore I would encourage everyone to at least try out believing (2) as well. After all without it we have no data on what is actually possible with it.

And yes, the actual result probably looks like some form of revolution, but it is not required that such a revolution be violent. Of course it might turn out to be, but that is more about how the entrenched power reacts. You need the movement first, and then you can see what the reaction is.

re chat control or similar things---it seems to me that if your system's democratic rules pass it, then things are working as intended. Complaining about the democratic system is rather a joke when it is operating and doing things legitimately (I don't live in Europe, though, so I don't know anything about how legitimate it actually is.) In general one "votes" in this paradigm by actually convincing large groups of people that they should take difference stances on issues, not by casting a single vote themselves. If a person's reaction to political outcomes they don't like is not "campaigns of influence" then they're not really playing the game at all, are they?

And to be clear, such a campaign of influence is not only available to powerful people. In fact they are cheaper to carry out than ever---we even have a new job title for them, "influencer", and it is revenue-positive for many people! So when someone complains about legitimate political systems but they don't personally decide to influence others to change the outcomes... they are just a non-entity in the system, that's their problem.

(I do not have anything charitable to say, however, about illegitimate politics, e.g. the Trumps administration's widespread illegal behavior. That seems like a failure of basic rule of law that might be considerably harder to dislodge. But, as much as I hate it, their winning an election and then fucking everything up on purpose is largely allowed... the underlying problem is that so many people seem to be okay with that. If a country wants to cut its own limbs off itself I guess that's fine at a level of politics. Not so good at a level of morality or philosophy---so I guess it shifts the battle to be at the level of hearts and minds instead of democracy. But the general point still stands: campaigns of influence are how you affect this, not individual votes.)

(edit: i did not, however, reread the other comments here to see if I actually misunderstood anyone. I'm just ranting)