I’ve seen people around me and in the general public turn ideologically crazy at a higher rate than I expected in my adult life. I lost one friend to a cult, watched others become brittle and freak out over tiny disagreements, and others become single‑minded about very specific, not‑so‑convincing world accounts. Underlying all of them is a single dynamic: you develop an extremist idea, encounter many dissenters, judge them as misinformed and cruel, and then update your belief that you’re more correct.

The only truly harmful step is that last update. Extremist ideas aren’t bad by definition; the danger is that they polarize you with negative conversations until you think the rest of the world is asleep or crazy. Most people are indeed "asleep" about most topics, lack deep expertise, and only know a few facts. When a person radicalizes—say, into Marxism—and then meets ordinary critics, the criticism is almost always confused, lacking nuance, or morally vague. This misleads the believer into thinking the critics are cruel реализ.

I’ve experienced this firsthand. A conservative friend misread a nuclear‑weapons deal and blamed me, leading me to conclude conservatives are stupid. It was a mistake that ignored the complexity of nuclear policy and the fact that most people have little expertise in that area. The lesson is that the average critic is usually poorly informed, not an indicator of your idea’s truth.