These are all plausible ideas about how other people arrive at the vast assortment of false things they believe. But I’ve heard many, many stories like these about what’s going on in other people’s heads, and I’m always left unsatisfied because… they’re just stories, so I can never be sure they’re correct. The people delivering the stories are always delivered confidently, never delivered with evidence, and usually delivered by people who have never been in the group whose psychology they’re explaining. Understanding minds very different from our own is a very tough problem ― I can’t even begin to understand my own father, for instance ― and I always feel that the level of care, scholarship, and epistemology brought to trying to understand them is vastly below what is needed.

So, you may be completely right. But I have no way to tell. Because of that, I expect to go to sleep tonight, and remember none of this in the morning, just as I can’t seem to remember the other stories I’ve heard. I seek those stories out, I read them, I watch them, but I never quite believe them. They’re like “tales from an alien planet! And the aliens are human! And the planet is Earth!” Because the topic is important, and important to me personally, and intended as nonfiction, I feel compelled to read every psychoanalysis I come across. But I’m not sure anything ever comes of reading them.

> You’ve succeeded at being a good person who harms the world.

I didn’t know what “ideology eating itself” might mean before clicking this, and I’m still not sure why this phrase should describe this process.