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.
Conversation
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
Replying to
"Ideology is poisonous. It's not that there are good ideologies and bad ideologies -- ALL ideology is poisonous. Because to have an ideological position assumes that you understand the nature of reality. How likely is that? How likely is that?" - Terence McKenna
1
2
2
Replying to
This is a meaningless criticism by a self-important mystic. Ideology is just a given of human behavior that manifests under certain conditions. Calling it poisonous is like calling gravity poisonous or hair poisonous.
1
Replying to
Just because it's something people do doesn't mean it's something that's good for them
1
Replying to
??? What even? Discounting that a tautology cannot say much of anything meaningful, there's levels of beliefs that can be just confirmed empirically, and I'm fairly sure that observing that people do things that sometimes are not good for them is part of it

