Something that occurred to me, inspired by many of the details of your story, was that actively seeking to cultivate rationality may internalize one's locus of control.

Locus of control is a measurable psychological trait that ranges from "internal" to "external" where an internal locus roughly indicates that you think events in your life are primarily affected by your self, your plans, your choices, and your skills. You can measure it generally or for specific domains and an internal locus of control is associated with more interest and participation in politics, and better management of diabetes.

My initial hypothesis for any particular person (reversing the fundamental attribution error and out of considerations of inferential distance) is generally that their personal locus of control is a basically accurate assessment of their abilities within the larger context of their life. If someone lives in a violent and corrupt country and lacks money, guns, or muscles then an external locus of control is probably a cognitive aspect of their honest and effective strategy for surviving by "keeping their head down". When I imagine trying to change someone's locus of control with this background assumption, the critical thing seems likely to be changing their circumstances so that they are objectively less subject to random environmental stresses with things like corruption-reducing political reform, or creating protected opportunities to work and keep the fruits of their labor, or something else that directly and materially changes their personal prospects for success.

I'd always thought that locus of control had obvious connections to rationality, in that it seemed that a justifiably external locus of control would make it rational to not bother cultivating rationality. Significant efforts or careful planning are pointless if success and failure in life will be dominated by unpredictable factors that swoop in from "out there" to manipulate outcomes in unforeseen ways. If your ship's destination will be determined by random winds that can tear your sails to shreds or speed you swiftly to a surprise destination, why bother making a map? The choice is pretty much just whether to get in the ship at all, and it's probably a bad idea unless your current conditions are abysmal.

Your story makes me wonder about connections in the other direction, from rationality to locus of control. It seems plausible that cultivated rationality might teach people to notice patterns, to find points of leverage, and to see the ways that they can affect the things that matter to them. Rationality education might be a personal intervention that could internalize a person's locus of control on the cheap, even without having substantial political influence or resources to direct their way.

More pragmatically, this makes me wonder if it would be useful to measure people's locus of control before and a while after an intervention designed to improve rationality? I guess an alternative hypothesis is that you've been involved in meetups and your social environment might have improved? Perhaps any group of reasonably non-evil people could have helped just as well? I can't think of any simple way off the top of my head to measure something that might help control for this factor...

It seems like it would be nice if "rationality itself" was the secret sauce, but "proving it for real" and then maybe optimizing based on the post-proof insights feels like something demanded by full thematic consistency :-)