Ever read Spengler, or Marx, or for that matter, Mein Kampf? There's not much difference between "recognizing a pattern" and putting forth a conspiracy theory. But at the same time, even recognized loonies can have legitimate insights. Try reading the Unabomber Manifesto sometime. Its not all incoherent rambling and rant. It only becomes toxic when it morphs from meditation to ideology. Ideology is always the enemy, because it assumes there are natural laws in history that can be harnessed and "managed". Its like reading a novel and trying to cast it in terms of symbols (does the railroad station symbolize Calvinism?). It turns human thought and philosophy into a parlor game with rules, winners and losers. That's why the twentieth century has come to be known as the Age of Ideology. Its what happens when scientific and engineering methodologies are imposed on human affairs.

The purpose, and true value, of Critical Theory is not to reveal the Truth, but to suggest new ways of thinking about it. Its a lot like art, even if you are a blues musician, you can learn much by listening to Bach. And most important, you can't say ahead of time just what it is you might learn, if anything. You cannot predict the future by studying the past, but at least you won't get blindsided as often.

And BTW, although the results and discoveries of mathematics have little to do with one's intuitions, the same cannot be said for the very human activity of doing mathematics. A lot of human mental processing is carried out subconsciously. As in a game of chess, you learn to trust your intuition; it has a way of predicting, more often than not, which strategies are likely to be successful, and which ones will probably lead to dead ends.

There's a lot to be said for studying the thought of those who did not rely as much as the moderns on rigorous objective analysis. You don't have to agree with them to take away something of value. After all, they were there first.