I am fascinated by how explanatory scholastic, philosophical, or political systems--ways of understanding the world--can be so different in content yet so consistent in form.  This is particularly a source of ironic pleasure when looking at two vociferous adversaries arguing about what are apparently different worldviews, yet formulating and attacking the same way.  There seem to be structural similarities even in very different thought systems.  Also,  I am also fascinated that people do not recognize how their arguments often are really not that different from each other's. 

While the opinions of a conservative or liberal may seem vastly different, while the strictures of a Mormon versus a Zarathustran may seem vastly uncomparable, and while the thought patterns of a romantic versus absurdist writer may seem vastly incongruent,  the fact remains that organized thinking tend to have commonalities.  There are rules, certain rubrics, and a definite loss of data. I am not a student of philosophy, but imagine this is partly what the philosophy of "Structuralism" is all about.

That these systems all come from human brains assures this.  We have limitations on our creativity. As organizing principles, the structures reflect our obsessional pattern--though that may be a pejorative way of putting it--of attempting to make things fit, or work. A need for closure, for an explanation, for encapsulating reality is human nature. And unfortunately, this is a trait when in surplus in a given person assures that the particular person being will be particularly dull. The most creative people have looser boundaries and more acceptance of chaos. And indeed they are less self-critical or hampered by that prosaic need to be perfect.

Intellectual systems attempt to rope the statistical messiness of everyday life with a series of laws or perceptions. All involve a loss of reality as that particular set of assumptions is fitted to fact. The fit is never precise. Some fits may be better than others. But generally, they are a set of beliefs that are constricting. And often they are not much differentiate at base, than their very opposite and derive from the same preoccupations. They may simply be the flip side of each other. As a younger therapist in the eighties, I recall that the adolescents who listened to heavy metal or glamorized "Satan Worship" often came from Christian communities. One would have been less likely to find a Satanist in a community that was essentially humanistic--say in a college community in a liberal part of the country, or in a portion of the world where religious values did not include a devil or other malevolent being. . There would be no interest. Without the underlying community interest in devils or where concepts such as good, evil, punishment, and a range of more specific Christian assumptions do not exist, there is not likely to be a counter philosophy. Similarly, one would not find a democrat in 3rd century Rome just because; such a position only grows in synchrony to an opposing set of principles. In Rome, there was no interest in debating the merits of small versus large government and no chance that a contentious debate, with ever growing cantankerous followers, would develop. And there would not be the current preoccupation without gender if our country were more libertine in the first place, rather than essentially puritanical.

Freud noted long ago that religion has many similarities with obsessive practices, and he might have broadened the same observation to politics, systems of intellectual criticism, or systems of philosophy. Another psychologist of a very different tradition described another vital concept here--that of B Cognition, seeing things apart from human usefulness, more objectively. 

Different symbol systems have different vocabularies. The world is explained by certain verbal rubrics, depending on time and place. Take a single newsworthy event within our lifetimes and see how many ways it could be described. Consider the murder of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldstein. Had that happened in the 1950s, that baleful event might have been explained as a function of godlessness, or communism, or the inherent problems in miscegenation. In the thirties, those events might have been seen in terms of  class conflict, or in the nineties regarded as part of institutionalized violence against women.  A science-minded person might aver that OJs actions were caused by  chromosomes, or, indeed (if the event occurred in the sixties) by a Richard Speck type extra Y chromosome. And how easily that murder could be ascribed to the effects of poverty. Or by a psychologist as "unmodulated affect or PTSD or toxic masculinity . Or any number of other catchphrases. An existential writer might say the event was best understood as "alienation." Or was it the plague of substance abuse that best explains the murder of Nicole Brown and her consort? Maybe concussive head injury is to blame, or corporate greed, and the exploitation of athletes in a sport that damages their brain   No doubt, someone somewhere would have had a very good, sensible essay on why the event exemplified latent homosexuality. Explanatory concepts come in and out of style. They are helpful heuristics, but if taken too seriously simplify rather than clarify reality.