I've said my piece. You cannot have modern societies without delegation of responsibilities and that directly stems from having and using information experts.
Failure to use those information experts is how you get bullshit dumbassery, not "Independent thinkers."
(Clarification--- Compare and contrast these statements-- "I think for myself, and dont' neet Faucci to tell me I need to wear a mask! It's just a little flu!" and "They're clearly all conspiring to make me get the vaccine for some horrible purpose, because they are trying so hard to get me to take it!" --- then cross reference those against the social media circles where people with those mindsets and ideas congregate, and turn into their own flocks, parroting and brandying those statements and that rhetoric. Are they thinking for themselves, or just delegating that thinking to a less qualified authority? I would say it is the latter.)
In a modern society, all humans are "sheep". Even the leadership. (who is dependent upon an army of specialists and their knowledge and expertise, to deliver them quality intelligence breifings, quality assessments of plans, and how prior plans operated, so that new ones can be better devised.)
The only "Not a sheep" people are the ones who live solitary hunter-gatherer lifestyles. As far as I can tell, that is the literal truth.
The issue is the pejorative, not the conception.
There is no shame, nor anything to be ashamed of, to defer to and leverage the benefits of, specialists with specialist skills and knowledge. That deference is the heart of "sheepleness".
A detractor to the above may try (wrongly) to divorce the fundemental need for deferring judgment to another authority from 'sheepleness', by trying to define the condition more like this:
Sheeple are people who trust their government blindly, and do what they are told.
Again, it is incorrect, because it tries to divorce the underlying need from the reality of the human condition, and then tries to smear it with the blame brush. Can governments (or any authority figure, for that matter) act as judas goats? of course they can. (See also Qanon-- Is Q not a maliciously crafted persona, leading people to misery, for self-serving reasons? He Q not a judas goat, and are the Qanons not sheeple? All they did was just allocate a DIFFERENT, and less qualified authority figure, then defer, as is NECESSARY, when functioning in a complex system.) That reality does not disprove the thesis--- That you MUST defer. You cannot NOT defer-- not and still avoid dangerous, systemically deleterious consequences. (See also, COVID, and the dangers posed by the large unvaccinated population.)
Deriding the 'sheeple', and proclaiming yourself a free thinker (which is demonstrably wrong, as I just gave examples of above--), is not a solution. It is a problem, in and of itself.