Humans are still evolutionary cavemen where reflex anxiety reduction was necessary for survival. In our concrete jungle there no predators for us to escape from and no basic survival needs to occupy us. We are prisoners of our need to reduce our innate anxiety most of which traps us with cycles of instant gratification and goal seeking.
This reflex is reflected on a daily basis by scapegoating. Literally a safety valve for our psychological discomfort. Simply transferring our discomfort to an external object or person or group. At least it would be a safety valve if the consequences of that transference were not destructive. It took milenia to come up with religion and the concept of a scarifical lamb in the Old Testament and laterally Jesus Christ was a masterstroke. He would shoulder all your sins and imperfections and all you needed was faith which we have evolved to have. Of course religion can use scapegoating harmfully such as the Spanish Inquisition but the increasing erosion of religion has led to the human need to scapegoat becoming either unregulated or used as a tool of mass manipulation. This is one of the commonest reasons for wars starting, to divert the psychological distress of the population for economic woes onto the evil enemy. Now of course we are seeing this exemplified as covid idiots and covid heroes and non vacc and vaccinated and vaccine passports etc. Governments have rapidly worked out that with minimal effort of virtue signalling they can achieve mass compliance with hardly any scintilla of truth of virtue or integrity.