After reading your writing here and thinking about it, I found myself reciting in my head the following passage from the enlightening essay In Front Of Your Nose, by George Orwell. He wrote it in 1946, but it could have been written yesterday.

'[We] are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality.'