In "The Inertia of Fear and the Scientific Worldview", by the Russian computer scientist and Soviet-era dissident Valentin Turchin, in the chapter "The Ideological Hierarchy", Soviet ideology was analyzed as having four levels: philosophical level (e.g. dialectical materialism), socioeconomic level (e.g. social class analysis), history of Soviet Communism (the Party, the Revolution, the Soviet state), and "current policies" (i.e. whatever was in Pravda op-eds that week).

According to Turchin, most people in the USSR regarded the day-to-day propaganda as empty and false, but a majority would still have agreed with the historical framework, for lack of any alternative view; and the number who explicitly questioned the philosophical and socioeconomic doctrines would be exceedingly small. (He appears to not be counting religious people here, who numbered in the tens of millions, and who he describes as a separate ideological minority.)

BaconServ writes that "LessWrong is the focus of LessWrong", though perhaps the idea would be more clearly expressed as, LessWrong is the chief sacred value of LessWrong. You are allowed to doubt the content, you are allowed to disdain individual people, but you must consider LW itself to be an oasis of rationality in an irrational world.

I read that and thought, meh, this is just the sophomoric discovery that groupings formed for the sake of some value have to value themselves too; the Omohundro drive to self-protection, at work in a collective intelligence rather than in an AI. It also overlooks the existence of ideological minorities who think that LW is failing at rationality in some way, but who hang around for various reasons.

However, these layered perspectives - which distinguish between different levels of dissent - may be useful in evaluating the ways in which one has incorporated LW-think into oneself. Of course, Less Wrong is not the Soviet Union; it's a reddit clone with meetups that recruits through fan fiction, not a territorial superpower with nukes and spies. Any search for analogies with Turchin's account, should look for differences as well as similarities. But the general idea, that one may disagree with one level of content but agree with a higher level, is something to consider.