a successful malignant ideology will promise to make your life better while actually sabotaging it and making it worse in ways that seem to prove the ideology correct. the more you follow it, the worse everything gets, while you become more and more devoted to it. demonic even.
I really like this Emerson riff: as long as you’re under the illusion that someone is the absolute and solitary progenitor of an idea, you cannot properly appreciate either the person or the idea