There is no consensus external view because the outside-in views do not harmonize. So the choice for an insider is to believe in either a solipsistic and self-serving self-image or an incoherent union of outside-in critical moral judgments that can be dismissed as incoherent.
Conversation
Example, for (capitalism, socialism), (capitalism, libertarianism) we get
X1: market
Y1: lazy free-riding
X2: efficiencies of scale
Y2: naïveté of small-scale/decentralized idealism
1
1
4
Point is, no ideology is ever characterized from first principles in practice. People who try to do that are (correctly) dismissed as impractical fundamentalists. An ideology only exists as a set of pairwise defenses of solipsistic self-certainty against *specific* competitors.
1
7
This is a neat arrangement because what it does is define the ideology via arguments of convenience against the specific weaknesses of competitors, based on their visible incentives while explaining their iwn behavior in terms of reasonable necessity rather than incentives.
1
2
Example: some degree of free-riding is an obviously likely in a welfare state, so that incentive becomes the definition of socialism. Their internal justifications (eg compassion) can be rejected as hypocrisy. But their own behavior is explained by “efficient market” not “greed”.
3
1
Example 2, (socialism, capitalism), (socialism, libertarianism)
X1: compassion, Y1: greed
X2: community, Y2: selfishness
Example 3 (libertarianism, socialism), (libertarian, capitalism*)
X1: individualism, Y1: bureaucracy
X2: innovation, Y2: cronyism
* capitalism in practice
1
1
This intersubjective approach to ideological self-definition is pragmatic, operationalizes and weaponizes attribution error at scale, successfully casts all failures as aberrations caused by the vices of others, and ensures you never have to admit you’re wrong about anything.
2
2
Ideology, like love, means never having to say you’re sorry.
Example: when market failures happen through distortions/ externalities, capitalists blame state institutions, libertarians blame cronyism, socialists blame greedy individualism. Nobody has to accept any blame.
1
1
4
Note what happens in such discourses. Specific problems are plausibly everybody’s fault and therefore nobody’s fault.
Nobody has to change behavior, everybody gets to preach at everybody else, recommending specific moral evolutions to them from vice to virtue.
3
1
2
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
