When people hold views for reasons of mood management (however sincerely), typically they are unable to respond intelligently to questions challenging their beliefs. Even very smart people will pull b.s. out of the hat and stick with it, moving on rapidly, mentally, to some other topic. Their response is not really thought through, it is a placeholder for “now I can move on to something else.” After all, consistency was never the goal in the first place, you might even argue that anti-consistency was what was needed, and what proved to be psychologically stable.
I once asked someone religious about mourning death and the answer I received was something like “Well, the people in New Orleans celebrate death with funerals like parties.” Now, I am not sure how true that is, but assume it holds. It still resolutely refuses to address why the queried person might mourn and grieve the death of loved ones, rather than celebrate their ascent to heaven. Nonetheless it fills in the box “I did say something back to the initial query.” The person then wanted to simply move on to another topic.
If you challenge smart people on this issue, namely the discrepancy between beliefs and actions, they often will respond with extremely weak counters and dismissals, rather than thinking the issue through.
Once you see this kind of psychological portfolio construction in action, and learn how to identify it, you cannot unsee it.
These days, you see it especially frequently in response to AI and its advances. People have an odd love-hate relationship with the models, and they adjust their emotional balance as their stress needs may require. They do not want to give up either the very positive or the very negative side of their visions, because then they would have a non-diversified emotional portfolio, and they would be very vulnerable to disappointment.
You can understand some of the current AI debates by pondering how religious people react to the deaths of their loved ones. It was never about consistency in the first place.
— Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/11/should-you-feel-grief-for-the-dead-who-go-to-heaven.html
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