[michaelbrave]

This isn't the same but related, for many of us that have left religions, the inertia it took was immense. It manifested for me something that looked like 5 years of depression. But afterwards I had lost my network of friends, family, and invalidated a lot of my experiences about how the world worked.

I imagine leaving a cultural and national identity way of thinking would have similar repercussions. Many would lose family relationships, friendships, professional networks and could potentially burn bridges with their home country in such a way as to essentially be in exile. All of that for something they aren't even sure is more true than what they know or could be biased in another way (as most of history is more of a cultural collective of things composed of selected facts in such a way as to paint a narrative or map of what happened).

I still think it's wrong, and I'm not sure how to solve it, but I can kind of understand why someone wouldn't follow their curiosity down the first steps toward an open mind.