But accident is just a clumsy and inadequately observed analog of the (extremely rational) scientific method. So...I'm not sold on this at all. Our mental tools of self-deception, avoidance, and the like can be explicitly battled, and to great advantage should we succeed. Further, if we do not engage in the battle, accident is little help: we can always rationalize away any inconvenient phenomenology using our powers of self-deception, avoidance, and so on.

So I agree that being phenomenologically experienced is an advantage in understanding things, but for the completely opposite reason: rationality has nothing to work with if you have no observations, nothing to reason from save preconceptions.

I also think you have it exactly backwards when it comes to what can challenge the power of the state. Monocultures, whether ecological or intellectual, are easier to manipulate, but less robust, almost universally. Dogmatic populism, random fads, even fake news can find much more purchase in a population of uniform and limited phenomenological experience than in a diverse intellectual ecosystem of either a wide range of highly limited experiences, or broadly possessed wide-ranging experience.

So it's something of a Faustian bargain: a state threatens its own ongoing existence in order to gain greater control over the population. Or, if it's accidental, there's no bargain, but the result is the same--the state has greater potential to manipulate the population, but also greater potential to be overthrown by a manipulated or self-organizing population. (C.f. Jan 6, the Big Lie, etc..)

Finally, you seem to have a conception of rationality as a particularly stupid and short-sighted instrument, conflating both the impulse to be rational and the enactment of rational thought into one thing. The two are, at times, at odds: enactment of rational thought requires true premises, but it's a pain to get true premises, so our laziness may lead us to reject inconvenient truths as wrong so we can more easily indulge our impulse to be rational. Bundling it all under "rationality"--especially when you seem to mean the rational impulse more than the practice of rational thought--serves primarily to confuse the issue and unfairly denigrate the properties and advantages of rationality.