Use when a colleague, student, or public figure justifies a harmful plan with an internally consistent theory — ask what room they've been sitting in. Use when reading a radical manifesto whose author's isolation is evident but the argument looks rational. Use when mediating a conflict where one side escalates an airtight justification despite visible breakdown.

Dostoevsky has Raskolnikov himself trace the theory back to his conditions: 'low ceilings and tiny rooms cramp the soul and the mind.' The point is causal — deprivation and isolation manufacture grand rationalizations the way fever manufactures delirium. It reframes how to handle dangerous ideas: treat the state, not the syllogism, because the syllogism is downstream of the state.