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.
Conversation
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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I don’t think it can be meaningfully defined at a personal level
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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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Those are personal ethics. They don’t become an ideology until you act to persuade others to adopt them.
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People try to persuade others to be nonviolent or vegetation. But I do not consider evangelizing as essential to ideology.
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No one said they have to be few 😉 You can bucket them into left/right/etc but that is arbitrary. It confuses more than aids understanding.

