mental factions......................

      There are minds that, having risen beyond primitive, unthinking orthodoxies, often merely turn to a rejection of the traditional.  Whoever has made this apparent advance is convinced that he or she has reached a superior condition.  Minds that have improved their knowledge and remained open to more have indeed progressed.  But we often find those who have achieved a critical attitude to the traditional have also adopted a largely, or wholly, uncritical attitude to untried, or even failed, alternatives whose attraction so verbal rather than real.

     "Special interests" are often, and sometimes rightly, indicted for various social and other offenses.  But, of course, special interests are not necessarily economic.  What may reasonably be called interest groups could equally be emotional or mental factions, that is, insistent minorities in society.  Often, what is more, they themselves feel pressure from their own extremer wings—that is to say, a minority within a minority.  Greed is only one of the deadly sins.

-Robert Conquest, The Dragons of Expectation:  Reality and Delusion in the Course of History

thanks Michael