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I have a half-formed thought about this. There are certain simple ideas whose implications are so profound and perspective-shifting that they essentially colonize a person's entire mind. I stress that these are simple ideas -- Christianity and classical liberalism are profound sets of ideas, but they are too complex for the average person to immediately filter everything in their lives through them. Simpler ideas are different, though -- it's easy to filter everything you experience or hear about through simple ideas like "the invisible oppression of the white man/Jew/etc is keeping good people down" or "the end times are nigh" or "the NAP is all that matters" or "the scientific method is the only valid source of knowledge" or "all social problems is rooted in class struggle" whatever.
I think that fixation on a single idea like this is actually a very mild form of mental illness, even the generally "respectable" ideas I included above (harcore libertarianism, communism, scientism). People get stuck on an idea and it becomes their entire, 1-dimensional universe. G.K.Chesteron has a great passage on this:
The entire chapter is worth reading.
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