Systems of belief are commonly engaged as performative role-plays in which the actual meaning or reality of whichever loosely cobbled bundle of assertions one inhabits need not in any way be anchored upon logical facts or verifiable truth. In fact, the more remote from plausibility or sensible, rational forethought and analysis that any particular position might be, the simpler and less costly as a cognitive intuition it becomes as a position to occupy and (subsequently, aggressively) defend. The enigma here becomes not that so many now double-down on unsustainably implausible absurdities, it acquires all the intractable complexity of a fact that it is precisely the unsustainable absurdity of such systems of belief that make them so attractive in the first place.
It is worth also remembering that ignorant misanthropy and alienated desperation exist on a multidimensional continuum, occupying the outer limits of a complex state space in which what might be more recognisably mature and well-reasoned thought simply represents other addressable coordinate locations.
I don’t think they are foundationally different in the ways they invest whatever cognitive capital they possess, it is more that they are seeking meaning without effort.
Daedelus Kite 