I really think it's simpler than that.
It can only get 'simpler' until it becomes caricature. I agreed with your initial post. The psychology of prior investment causes people to continue courses of action which no longer make sense in spite of better knowledge. The concept is scalable from minute aspects of daily life to the actions of nations.
My reply, however, was not to your comment. In fact, your comment could be based on a fallacy that a thing is either this or that when in fact it could be both, in addition to many other things. Cultural inertia (the psychology of prior investment on the macro scale); the 'necessity' of maintaining dollar hegemony by military force and control of trade, particularly crude oil, in approved currencies; the power of unelected bureaucracies; information control via public-private, corporate-government partnerships; the ever-oppressive attempts of those in key positions to manipulate the flows of energy, commodities, and liquidity in order to gain more power.
Let's simplify it: humanity is basically like yeast, except instead of sugar, humanity found the Earth's hydrocarbon deposits and is currently in the later stages of overshoot and collapse. There are rumors that a nice deposit of those hydrocarbons sits just off the coast of Palestine.
Personally, I find it amusing that a media so focused on making everyone sympathetic to "Muslim refugees" for many years all-of-a-sudden had to do a 180-degree-turn-around in their propaganda when it came to Palestine. Oh, sure the US.gov pretends to be concerned about Palestinians. Words are easy to use, but actions speak louder than words. It is an election year, after all, and it is still useful to have people believe that their choice on election day matters.
