I'm not sure if you've ever listened to the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, but I'm always struck by his level-headed and non-judgmental description of how humans can be duplicitous.

“The very things that make you so intelligently adaptive simultaneously make you vulnerable to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior.”

It’s not an endorsement, or an excuse, it’s a warning.

That quote came from his Awakening From the Meaning Crisis lecture series which @mark did a wonderful job summarizing here

https://markmulvey.medium.com/