Mitchell_Porter:

I ask myself what your case studies might be.

Well, any concrete case studies are by the very nature of the topic potentially inflammatory, so I'd first like to see if the topic can be discussed in the abstract before throwing myself into an all-out dissection of some belief that it's disreputable to question.

One good case study could perhaps be the belief in democracy, where the moral belief in its righteousness is entangled with the factual belief that it results in freedom and prosperity -- and bringing up counterexamples is commonly met with frantic No True Scotsman replies and hostile questioning of one's motives and moral character. It would mean opening an enormous can of worms, of course.

You might also want to explore a related notion of "intellectual progress bias", whereby a body of pseudo-knowledge is insulated from critical examination, not by moral sentiments, but simply by the belief that it is knowledge and that the history of its growth is one of discovery rather than of illusions piled ever higher.

Yes, this is a very useful notion. I think it would be interesting to combine it with some of my earlier speculations about what conditions are apt to cause an area of knowledge to enter such a vicious circle where delusions and bullshit are piled ever higher under a deluded pretense of progress.