Thought Idol Framework: A Unified Framework for Society, Religion, and Ideology Based on Plausibility and Anxiety

This study introduces the concept of the Thought Idol as a framework for organizing heterogeneous systems of thought such as religion, social ideology, science, and philosophy. A Thought Idol is a shared and fixed explanatory framework formed to cope with Anxiety, and its formative principles are positioned as Anxiety and Plausibility. The Thought Idol in this study does not refer to popular-culture idols or religious idol worship, but to the core of explanation formed to cope with uncertainty. The study further organizes the domains humans recognize as threats into three layers: PTD (Peripheral Threat Domain), CTD (Core Threat Domain), and VTD (Value Threat Domain). It shows that the characteristics of each Thought Idol and its social behavior differ depending on which domain it covers and how. The three-layer model provides a basis not only for positioning religion and social ideology but also for interpreting differences in how thought operates in contemporary society. With this framework, phenomena that appear unrelated—conflict, criticism, justice, and punishment—are organized into a single structure as competition among Thought Idols and the dynamics of maintaining Plausibility. Through these implications, the study presents a unified framework that describes heterogeneous systems through common principles.