People believe in what it’s more comfortable to believe in. COVID being a hoax means that lockdown is unjustified and that also means all of their issues would

People believe in what it’s more comfortable to believe in. COVID being a hoax means that lockdown is unjustified and that also means all of their issues would go away: no sitting at home, going back to work. It’s not about internal conflict, it’s about a pipe dream where it all goes away. And on a practical level I would think many people would prefer a double-digit probability of dying from COVID while working rather than a few years spent in financial limbo due to lockdowns. So at this point COVID being a hoax becomes way less black-and-white: maybe it being a hoax is just a way to say that “I would rather take the risk, and the hoax here is that you are vastly overestimating the fear of death in population” PS: I am not saying it’s a hoax, I am giving a reasonably plausible pattern of thought behind the mechanism justifying it being a hoax.