In pursuit of free booze – the start of any good anecdote – I found myself at the Cambridge Brexit Campaign’s ‘coming out party’ last Friday at Magdalene College. It was an event with a fairly incongruous collection of characters, ranging from the garden variety Eurosceptic to the unreconstructed Stalinist.

Arriving late with a friend, we did our best to mingle, engaging in light-hearted banter about the Common Agricultural Policy as we munched on our salted peanuts and slurped on Sainsbury’s white wine. On the whole the evening was shaping up to be rather pleasant.

But just as we began laying into a freshly filled bowl of Ready Salted crisps, this unremarkable evening took a rather bizarre turn. Looking for someone to teach us two tepid Europhiles the errors of our ways, we chanced upon an elderly gentleman with a ‘Vote Leave’ badge. After asking a harmless question about the EU, we were treated a speedy non sequitur which brought us unexpectedly onto the man’s real point of interest: ‘the Islamics’.

This shady group, we were reliably informed, are engaged in a grand conspiracy to conquer our land and steal our women, imposing Sharia law as they go. Casually mentioning his Rhodesian background (as if he could be a more perfect kind of racist), he launched into a 20-minute rant which chronicled all the classics of right-wing nuttery, swinging from unsavoury comments about birth rates to strange theories about forced migration by Arab leaders. As he began to muse on the need for a crackdown, I decided to top up my glass, but my companion doggedly argued back, attempting to rationalise with him using actual historical evidence.

Of course, this was a quixotic effort. For people like this, their worldview, no matter how odd or conspiratorial, is practically a religion. It is the very background to their life experience, the basic logic they can fall back on for any political or moral question. It is unquestionable, immune to facts, and explains everything. The ardent believers of mad conspiracy theories and extremist politics demonstrate only the worst symptoms of this sclerotic disease. A milder form of the illness can be found in many of us. From the student Left, which takes academic theory and uses it to explain and criticise in excruciating detail the minutiae of everyday life, to those on the Right who chastise a European Union which they see as one step away from Stalinism, the poison of dogma pervades.

Now it may seem rather Blue Specs-ish of me to insinuate a shared psychology between WomCam, Marxists, and our white nationalist friend, but bear with me. What I’m talking about here is something which plagues us all.

Ideologies are simple. That’s why we like them. They clarify and inform our daily decisions, helping us to make decisions, from CUSU referenda to buying bananas. But we should be wary of taking them to be all-permeating and impenetrable. Whether it’s socialism, feminism, or conservatism, ideology should be little more than a heuristic tool; not a master, but a slave. I remember once being told that any political theory that explains everything is probably wrong. Even in science, a proper understanding of physical phenomena can only be garnered by a nebula of overlapping models and theories.

But as a student, especially one interested in politics, it can be hard not having an opinion. Being at university itself can be bruising to one’s intellectual ego. Everyone seems to know something that you don’t and have opinions on the most obscure of topics. This pollutes the conversational environment with the toxic notion that one must know their opinion and express it as if it is undeniable. To not know is almost an embarrassing admission, no matter how subjective the topic at hand.

The temptation here to settle into a pre-cast set of thoughts is obvious. But resist it we must. Indeed if there’s one thing I learnt in my first term of university, it was precisely how many of my opinions were, and continue to be, almost entirely bullshit. This is surely the assumption we should always begin with. A resolute dismissal of our own capacity for an intelligent understanding of the world can be quite a liberating thing in a world full of shrink-wrapped opinions. It has been said that it is only when you graze on the lower slopes of your own ignorance that you can claim to be educated at all, and I think this a mind-set that we should all bear in mind next time we make a snap judgement or slip into ideological tropes.

There is virtue in uncertainty, and if there is one characteristic which can bring light to a heated political debate, it is the quiet genius of the partially perplexed.