It's hard to pull a load-bearing card out of a house of cards, so instead we tend to rationalize why it's good.

The bigger the house of cards the harder a foundational card is to change, even if it turns out to be wrong/bad.

The more load-bearing something is, the more likely that if it's wrong it's catastrophic and destabilizing, so the more likely you and everyone else will have motivated reasoning to discover why "it's correct, actually".

This problem gets worse the longer it festers and the more load-bearing it is.

It's easier to just keep building instead of changing foundations. "I dunno, let's just add better layers on top and not think about what's underneath the house."

Carl Sagan: "One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."