Living in the Red State, Bible-belt South, I've often had to ask myself the question, "How can someone who is otherwise so intelligent and well-read as him/her also maintain a belief in their mind as ignorant and uninformed as that?"  The specifics about the person and about the ignorant and uninformed beliefs vary from case to case - sometimes it's politics, sometimes it's religion, sometimes it's just plain buffoonery - but the question keeps coming up again and again. 

It usually goes like this: someone is trying to explain something to me, something that I just know is completely and totally incorrect, and I try to set the record straight with "the facts" and find them looking at me in a condescending way that tells me they consider my opinion naive and embarrassingly childlike.  

So the answer to my question may be found by rearranging it to ask myself "How can an intelligent and well-read person like him/her come to consider the reasonable beliefs in my mind as ignorant and uninformed?"  

Are we all blinded by our self-delusion?  Have we all mistaken the mental models we've constructed for the truth?