Abstraction is usually considered to be something of value within and between systems, rightfully so. An everyday person doesn't need to know the finer details of the things they utilize everyday to obtain value out of those things. For example, they don't need to know how their brain's reward system, smart phone and the internet work to enjoy spending majority of their day in front of a screen. For a non-curious mind, understanding the complexity behind the abstractions has no value. Understanding the basics of every single event in one's life can be tedious and in some cases, counter-productive. Why bother understanding how a smartphone works if it just works? Human brain likes abstractions. It generates models of everything to conserve energy. When you look at a tree, you don't have to look at every single leaf and branch to figure out it's a tree, you just know it's a tree because you've seen one in the past and the one you're looking at resembles your past experience of a tree. Your brain works like that for almost everything you experience consciously. When you look at another person, you know that you're looking at a gigantic collection of cells but that detail is useless for the most part while trying to interact with that person. Such abstractions are good but if every complexity is ignored under the abstractions, it results in more complexity.
Living in the world of abstractions can cause unnecessary havoc and suffering while living in a world of complexities can make you go insane. There should be a compromise on both sides. Utilize abstractions as much as you can but never forget the complexity behind those abstractions. Let's calling looking at the world under a microscope the most reductive one can be. This level is not useful for anything other than studying the microscopic world. Let's jump straight to subjective experience from the world of atoms because everything in between can be considered reductive. Did you catch it? Ignoring the in-between layers of complexity while adding abstraction added more complexity. That added complexity makes the most smart people say things like "We have free will". If one feels like they have free will (which I would argue is an illusion, even the feeling of having free will is an illusion), one cannot simply forget the world of atoms or quantum physics while making such statement. Everything is either determined, random or a combination of both. If you look at the world through science and not feelings, making such statement is hard to understand. This ignorance combined at each abstraction level can cause more complexity than there ought to be.
All abstraction layers can be useful but you will not be wrong to think to yourself "I like to be around people who think like me because this trait was beneficial in the past for survival. I love people romantically or platonically because again, having such trait was beneficial in the past to stay alive and to keep newborn humans alive". Then, understanding the existence of cults becomes rather intuitive. Then, the feeling of extreme love while thinking about your partner might eradicate the concept of soul-matery and put forward the understanding that your conscious experience is being rewarded by your brain with feel-good neurochemicals because one of your basic necessity of life seems to be met, at least for a while.
There are decent amount of altruistic people out there but I would argue that they are altruistic because they are selfish. A person donating a meaningful amount of money to some charity anonymously is also selfish because they feel good after doing so. If there was not any positive feeling attached to that donation, it would never happen. Think of the most virtuous act you can imagine a human do, even that act is selfish because that act will not be done if there was not even a minute positive feeling attached to it. The word 'selfish' has a bad ring to it but I don't consider it as a negative trait. It is what makes us human. Divorcing this idea gives birth to angels and monsters. Calling Jesus an angel and calling Hitler a monster might seem the right thing to do but both of those gentlemen just fell prey to their brain wiring. I am not stating that they are equal. You can praise Jesus but there is no place for cultish love for him. Likewise, you can resent Hitler but there is no place for associating evil with him. You get cultish love and evil only while staying in the world of abstractions. Understanding that every single human has the possibility to be Hitler or being worse than him is humbling but it is not a surprise if you look behind abstractions. The understanding of complexity under abstract human behavior reduces dramatization.
Every once in a while when you're doing something or feeling something, ask yourself "Why?" and try to be reductive. Thinking like this might strip away meaning from most things in your life as we tend to find meaning in dramatization but I would argue that meaninglessness is better than suffering. Thinking that there are evil people out there who are controlling might make you feel like you are living in a plot. This might not seem intuitive but having a victim mentality gives you an identity which in turn gives you meaning. Think of a main character in a depressing movie whose life is full of suffering. Most likely, you imagined that main character having romanticized sadness, the sitting next to a rainy window and smoking kind of sadness. If I had just asked you to imagine an actual person suffering every single day in their life, you might imagine a woman living in Afghanistan or children doing slave labor or dying from starvation in poor parts of the world. Why adding the words "main character" and "movie" change the thought process entirely? Because more self identity is associated with the movie character. Forming identities give us meaning but they are mere illusions. You are not the same person as you were when you started reading this. It is true neuro-anatomically as well as subjectively. Identities are just abstractions over complex human behavior. Evil exists but not evil people, sadness exists but not sad people, goodness exists but not good people and so on.