Limitations of ideology
don't use a hammer when the appropriate tool would be pliers
People are into politics and ideologies for all sorts of reasons, but usually it’s not because they’re interested in an open-ended process to determine ideal outcomes or optimal policy.
I learned this when I reflected upon my high school political engagement.
It was the kind of suburban school mostly attended by the children of high school teachers and office workers and the occasional spawn of lawyers or local politicians. Getting a vegetarian meal in the cafeteria was easy and most teachers vocally lauded the engagement of the ninth graders who chalked “2050: Mummy, what’s a polar bear?” messages all over the schoolyard during the Fridays for Future era.
Of course, me being me, I was a contrarian, and I hadn’t yet learned to shut up. I thought the political messages being pushed in the classrooms were too one-sided and overly simplified. I rebelled. I founded and ran the political debate forum and the student newspaper and started a statewide petition at one point. Fellow students who had their own individual points of contention with the orthodoxy flocked to my initiatives.
So, I was politically engaged. I never joined a formal organisation, but that was because I never found one I vibed with. If I’d found my own Amis de l’ABC, I’d have joined in a heartbeat. (My attempts to found it never took off.)
And I had really idiotic opinions for the entire time I was doing this.
Part of the problem was that I only rarely got challenged for real. If I’d been a less good debater, I might have had less stupid opinions, because I’d have encountered more people capable of arguing me out of them. But that was completely beyond my horizon. I thought: These people are really invested in their opinions. This means it’s in their self-interest to defend them with the strongest arguments available. If they’re arguing in favor of X with argument Y, then Y is the strongest argument that can be made in favor of X. Right? No.
Objective truth – alignment with reality - isn’t very high on most people’s list of priorities. Some people care about winning debates, like others care about winning a game of football. That’s not the worst possible process for being less wrong, but it is not foolproof.
People are into politics or ideologies because of things having to do with group identities, or because they want the status they get from being an engaged citizen, or to show that they’re decent people who work towards a better world, or whatever. Whether their talking points actually make sense or not is irrelevant, until they run into an obnoxious loudmouth like me who doesn’t get it.
We have different modes we use for arguments, near mode and far mode. Far mode is especially suited for signalling because of the loose feedback mechanism with our daily lives. That’s why everyone is annoyed by activists who insist on applying their ideology to everyday occurrences - if I’m supporting Green ideology, I don’t actually want to think about it when I’m buying exotic fruit in a discounter. Rationalists have argued this better than I could, so here's a link, and here.
This explained some of the bad arguments, but didn’t seem like a strong enough explanation for some of the more ludicrous assertions. I’d begun to distrust my own political opinions by then, because they’d changed too many times. And observing my own opinions, eventually another pattern emerged.
When thinking about politics, the most important thing I’ve learned so far from this is that ideologies are based on models, and models are useful tools which, like every tool, have limitations.
We cannot possibly see the world as it is. We run a model of it in our minds that is drastically simplified and misses almost everything of what is out there which could be seen. The map is not the territory, as the saying goes. Sometimes, when we debate, we formalise these models to share insight with others, and sometimes such a model becomes the foundation on which an ideology is built.
Here’s the thing: These models are decent maps in some places of the territory, and less accurate or even plain wrong in others. No map charts all of the territory, or is equally accurate in all places. In a debate, we should be trying to use the most accurate map available for a given piece of territory. Problems inevitably arise when someone insists on using their particular map for the entire territory, or on using it in an inappropriate place.
An ideology is built around some aspects of reality it describes well, and valuable insights drawn from that. That’s the sphere of validity in which it is a useful tool. Outside of that sphere, don’t try to solve a problem with a hammer if it calls for pliers.
I think it would be really cool if I had a list of ideologies detailing what sort of question they’re good at answering, and where we need danger signs. I don’t. I don’t know enough about most ideologies to make that list. Maybe I’ll write it some day.
I’m aware others have argued all of this better than I can, and I’m mostly writing this to have an answer to point to the next time someone asks: “So what are your opinions, politically speaking?”