That psychological tricks like this are necessary to make people see that 1+1=2 makes me feel hopeless that humanity can ever reach the level of Star Trek without some kind of genetic engineering or letting AI take over. The vast majority of people are like this, incapable of reasoning through anything, only defending the views they grew up with or that they ascribe to their "tribe" by any means possible, never taking a Planck unit of time to self-reflect. There's some respite on select internet corners but even those have their pockets of crazies.
I recently had to regrettably leave a fandom Discord server because a sizable portion of the populace including the admin devolved into screeching banshees with no capacity for rational thought at some /slightly different/ view than they preferred being posted in their politics channel, and I could no longer justify expending any energy trying to engage in a reasonable fashion with these people or supporting a server with such a rotten administration I'd lost all respect for. I wonder if those of us who can consider ideas without throwing ourselves on the floor in a tantrum over the fact someone disagreed with us should just move to another planet then come back and conquer Earth in the five years it would take us to develop the capacity to do so without such people in our way.
You have, I think, accurately identified the problem which religions try to solve.
Also, please don’t think yourself above, as you say, “The vast majority of people”. You yourself are like this too (and me). It’s just that you have different things which you think are important. It’s only when we aren’t attached to any particular view that any of us can reason with any semblance of logic. Which is why, I guess, that some religions urge detachment.
Is there evidence many religions "try" to do anything rather than simply being amalgamations of stories? I heard once some developed more as a means of control by kings but I don't have any source. The only religion I know of that I'd say really gives a good counter to the problem in question is Buddhism. And frankly I would consider anyone able to carry out these virtues to be "above" a lot of people in a certain way.
Nobody can read minds, and certainly not the one of an entire religion, and by its very nature this is something which could never be spoken about publicly by its representatives. So we have only the actions of religions to go on. If we discount all the actions which can readily be explained as the kind of random madness stemming from any cult-like organization and/or culture, I get the impression that many religions actually do try to reign in the population at large and keep them in reasonable behavioral patterns.
I recently had to regrettably leave a fandom Discord server because a sizable portion of the populace including the admin devolved into screeching banshees with no capacity for rational thought at some /slightly different/ view than they preferred being posted in their politics channel, and I could no longer justify expending any energy trying to engage in a reasonable fashion with these people or supporting a server with such a rotten administration I'd lost all respect for. I wonder if those of us who can consider ideas without throwing ourselves on the floor in a tantrum over the fact someone disagreed with us should just move to another planet then come back and conquer Earth in the five years it would take us to develop the capacity to do so without such people in our way.