One explanation that covers everything explains nothing

A framework that never encounters a case it cannot handle has stopped carrying information.

A recognisable pattern begins with a single organising idea presented as the key to an unusually wide range of questions. The appeal is real, because the feeling of a confusing world snapping into order is genuinely pleasurable, and the idea is usually not stupid. It typically starts as a decent insight about a narrow thing. The trouble comes with the expansion, when the same lens is turned on every subject and keeps producing confident readings, none of which the framework can fail to produce.

The diagnostic is simple. Ask what the framework cannot explain. A useful idea has a boundary: cases it handles well, cases it handles badly, and cases it says nothing about. Someone who holds a genuinely useful idea can usually name its limits without much prompting, because they have hit them. Someone whose idea explains everything has not found the boundary, which almost always means they have stopped looking rather than that no boundary exists.

Watch too for how contrary evidence is treated. In a healthy framework an awkward case is interesting, something to be accounted for or conceded. In the pattern under discussion, the awkward case is absorbed: it becomes further proof, or an exception with a ready explanation, or a sign that the observer has not understood. When every possible observation confirms the theory, the theory has quietly stopped being about the world. It has become a way of talking about the world instead, which is a different and much less useful thing.