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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Trick to breaking out of these patterns is to ignore analyses that do not center specific behaviors of named people. When you do that, it will turn into a game of no-true-Scotsman. Pick 2 of 3: a name, an ideology, responsibility for a problem
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If you ditch ideology, you’ll at least find someone to hold accountable within your means. Not vote for them, not work with them, not buy their stuff etc. This is what cancel culture clumsily tries to do, except via mob judgment contagion rather than actual distributed judgment.
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Everybody was all bullish on ideologies a few years back, and many people wanted to work on them, innovate on them, etc. Now everybody is sick of them, and tries or pretends to be above them. But they aren’t going anywhere. Good time to invest actually.
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Shouldn't ideology be personal? At a mob/society/country level it is some hodgepodge that we are left pattern matching, but is essentially undefined.
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Why not? 'I will not harm others unless my survival is at stake' can be a principle and being fit but not violent or not eating meat can be the policy.
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