This is a favourite topic! Arguably, a true heresy is sort of like an optical illusion, where you can both view the same thing and see something completely diff

This is a favourite topic! Arguably, a true heresy is sort of like an optical illusion, where you can both view the same thing and see something completely different. The "what color is this dress" meme is an example, where each perspective would be the complementary heresy to the other if an authority decided one was going to be the orthodox color. To have a heresy, you need an official orthodoxy for it to be against, but an official orthodoxy is an enforced belief - which means it is not necessarily willing, which further means the orthodoxy is not a belief in truth at all, but the effect of compliance. Heresy is a non-compliant view. However, the classic heretic error is they think other people are ignorant of what's going on, when they're really just trying to hide any doubt that would set them up for exile. It's the Assange/wikileaks view of "if only people knew how sausage was made, they would revolt!" without realizing the reason all those people are climbing over each other to parrot absurditiies is because they don't want to be the ones left without sausage. Also, not all heresies are true, but they must be logically equivalent to be the true counter-point of an orthodoxy. The crappier the logic of the orthodoxy, the more broad and absurd the heresies. This is where you get into Big Lie territory, where Kim Jong Un hitting 11 holes in one on the golf course is the absurd orthodoxy that makes all truth that deviate from it heresy, and that's a filter to catch people who can't sustain the dissonance and submission. I'm optimistic that few people really believe strongly in absurd orthodoxies, but we align with them because it's strategic or wise to stay out of the way of the enforcers. Stalin's totalitarianism was based on millions of people knowing everything authorities said was absurd but still competing with each other in the zero sum attrition game of staying ahead of those who could not sustain the dissonance. It's trivial to set up. You put an absurdity at one end, and a plausible or merely spectacular threat of violence on the other, and give people the option of compliance or exile/death, and their fear will drive them to compete with each other to demonstrate their alignment to the absurdity. The minority who cling to truth even at the risk of the violence become an internal enemy, as the ones competing at being absurd need a flow of people to sacrifice behind them, and you get a snitch culture. This is basically a playbook. To absurdity, everything is heretical. Given this logical relationship between an orthodoxy and a heresy, it's less interesting what a given herectical idea might be than it is whether the quality of its logic is equivalent to that of the orthodoxy it is in reaction to.