Yeah, I was talking primarily cosmology too. I'm also aware and agree that we are curious and it bakes our noodle. However, no cosmological model we have is complete and some are utter nonsense on top of it. And frankly, whether it's shamanic dualism (and subsequent religious worship) or atheistic materialism with all its bells and whistles (or anything in-between), none of them is exactly uplifting. In the light of any of them, human behavior simply looks absurd and utterly counterproductive.
I mean, if we are e.g. in a simulation and tested upon then it's absurd to fight each other, if the world is ruled by capricious spirits and gods then the case is the same, exactly as it is if the cosmos is just a vast cold space and we are algae on a crust of a melted rock hurling through space. In all of those cases our societies are dumb. In all of those cases we are like that cow you describe, but we are the ones who inflicted that on ourselves (notwithstanding the predominant cosmologies of any particular era). Obviously, what's the actual cosmology makes no difference as the cosmological situation already is what it is independent of our knowledge of it.
Moreover, knowing cosmology never made anyone a better individual. Better in the sense that they don't suffer so they don't vent their suffering on the rest of the world. Just look at yourself, you don't accept so-called "scientific dogma" and are convinced that you are closer to the truth. Yet, you are still angry, have fits of rage, etc. Perhaps even more than before. How did knowing what you consider a more accurate cosmology make your life better? It didn't.
To sum it up, knowing cosmology does not solve anything beyond technology. But knowing yourself, in addition to a satisfying life without suffering (no matter the cosmology!), also highlights which cosmology and to what extent is worth one's trust. After all, when you know yourself you don't bullshit yourself. It's impossible because you cannot know yourself, if you bullshit yourself.
Oh, and there's a nice Buddhist tale that illustrates the issue: One day a monk asked Buddha about the nature of cosmos and life after death. Buddha answered, “You are like a soldier on a battlefield who was wounded by an arrow and a doctor tries to save his life. But the soldier insists that the doctor cannot treat his wound before he tells him who was the man who shot him, what bow he used, which tree the arrow was cut from, and so on. Of course the soldier would die before he would get all his answers.”
And just to be explicit, the morale of that story is pretty straightforward -- if you don’t get rid of the arrow of your ignorance, if you don’t know yourself first, you will never know the answers to the “metaphysical” questions you ask. You will eventually run out of time and the answers will make no sense to you either. But what's more, no matter what cosmology, without self-knowledge said cosmology will always be incomplete as it will obviously lack self-knowledge (which, as I sad previously, is the only "thing" we can know with 100% absolute certainty and so it pretty much grounds and puts into proper perspective the rest of our knowledge).
