Could We Not Have Ideologies?
Ideology: “a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.”
Also: “the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group.”
Suppose you are an alien from a collective, like the Borg from Star Trek. One day you discover humans, and find that they all think differently. They possess these individual mental frameworks for making sense of the world, called ideologies. Some of these ideologies are very popular: liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, populism. Some are less common: monarchism, anarcho-communism. Others are so rare that they may not even have names.
As the Borg, your conclusion is that these modes of thinking must correspond to different collectives that have different goals. You cannot imagine that one ideology is “right” and another is “wrong.” But then you meet humans, and it turns out that they argue about this. One person tries to convince another to think more like they do, even though they belong to the same group. This does not make any sense to you. If these people are not adversaries who want to exterminate each other, why do they have systems of thinking with opposing principles?
The Borg discover that humans have limited mental bandwidth as individuals. They cannot look at a particular issue, decide on the optimal outcome they want, and come up with a plan to make it so. They see a problem, start reasoning about it and come to a stop before reaching a sound conclusion. For example, one human says “inequality is bad! We need to strive to make everyone more equal!” So you reason: Inequality needs to be defined over a particular variable. It could be anything: weight, height, number of hairs on the scalp. Each of these variables has a distribution. You ask some questions:
What are these people trying to optimize for?
How have they decided which variables need to be more equal?
When will they know that they have reached optimality? Does everyone need to weigh the same? Does everyone need to have the exact same amount of material goods?
You realize that generally humans do not want to quantify these things. They intuitively believe that their world would be better if things moved more towards a certain direction. Not only they do not agree on the direction, but also they fail to see that any change in one variable affects many others. For example, they experimented with a framework they called Communism, and it turned out to work differently than they expected. If they had created a rough mathematical model of themselves and simulated the experiment, they could have saved themselves decades of actual implementation.
I try really hard to not have an ideology. Obviously this is impossible, as implied in the name of this substack. I have arbitrary values whether I like it or not. My preferred state of the world is probably different from yours. However, there is a difference between thinking “I want to live in a world in which X is illegal” and “people who think X should be legal are mistaken.” Pick any X, for example the sale and manufacturing of tobacco. I would like to live in a world in which there is no legal tobacco consumer industry. However, would that be a better world? The question has no meaning to me. It could be that something else that is worse than tobacco replaces it. It could be that the side effects of eliminating the tobacco industry are bad for some regions. Note that I picked an easy one, and I’m just trying to play devil’s advocate. It’s very likely that eliminating the tobacco industry results in a net positive, at least regarding life expectancy and qualify of life of humanity. There are so many contested issues for which this is more unclear.
My main concern with ideologies is that they are cognitive shortcuts. The purpose of an ideology is to make it easier to decide where to stand on an issue. Without an ideology, you have two choices:
You can simply decide to not have an opinion on every issue that does not affect you directly. If and when something becomes personal (say, abortion, military service, etc.), then you decide your position based on what’s good for you personally.be
You can pick any issue that you’re interested in, and do a rational analysis from first principles. You could do an exhaustive statistical model with the pros and the cons, and your estimated probabilities of good and bad effects. For example, say you want to decide whether you are in favor of electric cars, or nuclear energy, or vegetarianism. You could throw everything that matters to you into a calculation, create the most sophisticated spreadsheet you’re capable of. Say one day you receive an offer to go work for Tesla. You make sure your electric car vehicle spreadsheet is up to date with the latest facts you can find, and then decide your position on the industry.
Most people won’t choose either of these options. It’s natural to want to have an opinion on every topic out there. We are social beings, and we want to belong. On the other hand, it’s really hard to do the work of keeping a rational model of the world. The Borg might do this, with their collective memory and astounding processing capability. Most of us just don’t care enough. We will see a convincing tweet or post that reinforces our opinion, and that will be the end of it. Some of us will do a half-assed attempt at reasoning, and stop long before taking the chain of causes, consequences and probabilities anywhere near where they could go.
My personal choice is to:
a) try to avoid forming opinions on most topics that appear on my radar. More than anything I will attempt to not share proto-opinions with strangers on the internet. I may say I liked a book or a movie, but nobody cares about what I think of whether sporting a mullet should be a capital offense (or mandated by the state for everyone with sufficient hair).
b) if I do want to have an opinion on a topic, I will try to research it as much as possible. If someone presses me for an opinion on a topic I know little about (say, a war in progress) I will simply say “all I know about this issue is what the internet throws at me. I am researching, but I don’t have an opinion yet.” If and when I do arrive at an opinion, I will want to make sure that it is completely dependent on my assumptions on the facts supporting it. If I want to do anything of note with this opinion, then I must make sure that my facts are up to date. If not, I am contributing a stale and buggy opinion to the world. There are enough of those already.
I invite you to do your own version of this. It may be an unwinnable game, just like playing tic-tac-toe against the world’s most powerful supercomputer. That doesn’t mean we cannot have fun scribbling our Xs and Os in the sand.