Here is what political opinions look like from the outside. Which ideology is the best one?
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Are you saying that all ideas are ideologies? When I was 12, I had lots of ideas how people should relate to each other, but they were wholly inconsistent, mostly random, and not a major part of any extant ideology.
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Me, too. The older I get the more it appears to be that there is no single set of values, rules and policies that is guaranteed to yield the best outcomes, and that adherence to individual political camps is inversely correlated with agency over one's understanding.
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Most people would agree that some individuals are more rigid ideologues than others, which seems to be a dimension independent of having ideas about society.
In that case, it is logically inconsistent to believe that everything is ideology.
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The most rigid ideologues I encountered had very few *original* ideas about society — their ideas were wholly borrowed from others.
An idea becomes a part of an ideology only when it reaches a certain point where it becomes transmitted as a “meme complex.”
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It’s not that an idea is being transmitted that makes it an ideology— It’s that it is being transmitted *whole,* with few modifications, sort of how a viral DNA retrotransposon is transmitted from parent to offspring, and when modifications do happen, they are often random.
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The error correction usually happens above the individual level: the social movement itself may crash, as for instance Maoism or Eastern Germany did. Hiveminds are stupid, because they have to rely on inertia and resilience against change to achieve stability over lots of hosts.
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