The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy

Andy Masley

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Recs & Advice<br>The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy<br>Don't update positively on your extremist beliefs whenever you hear a bad argument against them

Andy Masley<br>Oct 16, 2025

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I’ve seen people around me and in the general public turn ideologically crazy at a higher rate than I expected to in my adult life. I lost one friend to a cult. Others became so brittle that they can barely interact with normal people without freaking out over tiny disagreements. Others have just become very ideologically single-minded and attached to very specific (and in my opinion not very convincing) accounts of the world. These people’s backgrounds, and the ideologies they went crazy over, were all wildly different from each other. But underlying all of them is a single really bad dynamic that I think is actually easy to identify and stop. The dynamic goes like this:<br>You develop an extremist idea.

You bump into a lot of people who disagree with the idea.

Almost every single person who disagrees with you comes off as wildly misinformed about basic facts about the world, and have pretty horrible background moral intuitions about simple ethical questions. Their disagreements are also very visible entirely rooted in their pre-existing social identity.

You conclude that the vast majority of critics of your extremist idea are really wildly misinformed, somewhat cruel or uncaring, and mostly hate your idea for pre-existing social reasons.

This updates you to think that your idea is probably more correct.

My claim here is that the only thing wrong here, the thing that really messes people up, is that last step where you update in favor of your idea.<br>I’m not against extremist ideas on principle. I have my own, the main one being that animal welfare is a much larger urgent catastrophe than most people believe. But I think extremist ideas should come with a few warning labels.<br>The main danger with believing an extremist idea is that it’s very very easy to be negatively polarized by a ton of bad conversations with normal people about it, until you feel like the whole rest of the world is crazy and asleep. The reason it’s so easy is that most people are in fact “asleep” about most things most of the time, not super thoughtful in how they develop beliefs, and really only have expertise in a few areas often related to their jobs.<br>Suppose you become politically radicalized and become a Marxist. You get convinced that the labor theory of value is correct. You learn all about the pantheon of Marxist theorists through the 20th Century. You really dig in and know all the arguments and concepts by heart. It coheres with what you see on the ground: poor people pointlessly treated badly by big systems, a lot of band-aid solutions to poverty that leave workers without authentic power and control over their lives. You update more and more in favor of Marxism. Then you start talking to other people about it.<br>Consider two categories of people:<br>The number of people in the general population who will object to Marxism.

The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect, and can speak to your very specific concerns about worker power and class conflict in a way that gets across how modern social theorists and economists give a more compelling and ethically coherent account of the way the world works, and do so patiently and thoroughly.

How many people will you meet who are in both 1 and 2, vs just 1? I think it would probably look something like this:

With no offense meant to any group listed here, the average person in America didn’t complete college (only 37% have a degree). Fewer than half read a book in the last year. Two thirds don’t know that when inflation happens, money loses value. Many people adopt beliefs because it seems like the people they think of as good adopted them too. What percentage of these people can adequately give a convincing account of why liberal democratic capitalism is preferable to Marxism? Most Marxists I meet have a ton of stories of people they’ve met saying things like:<br>Some people need to be rich, and others need to be poor. That’s just the way it is.

Poor people deserve to be poor. If they worked harder they wouldn’t be having these problems.

Marxism means everyone needs to be equal, but if everyone were equal no one would be…

This leaves them feeling like most people who criticize Marxism are uncaring, dumb, or crazy, and therefore that Marxism is more likely to be true, and people’s other ideas are more likely to be false. I remember one radical friend was pretty shocked to find out that I identified as a liberal capitalist, and brought up “I knew someone who identified as a liberal a while ago. He didn’t even know what mutually assured...