Ideology is an Explanatory Phenomenon
Okay that title sounds really boring, but this is really important. We like to describe ideologies, particular our enemy’s, as being about some different fundamental moral goal than what we want - those Nazi’s want an Aryan state, those Communists are ethically committed to equality, those patriarchs just want male power, those feminists just want… etc etc. This is called a “terminal value” and most people who are reading this know that terminal values aren’t a thing you can argue over. If your utility function is just based on maximizing the number of paperclips in the universe, then that’s all that matters to you and there’s no logic or evidence that will convince you otherwise.
Thing is, that’s not how any of these ideologies work. For instance, that’s not how you work, is it? You don’t want to just increase one thing to the exclusion of all else. (Unless you’re going to say something nebulous and complicated like “happiness” or “life”.) You’re a sensible person who wants things overall to get better on a number of fronts. You want people to be less angry at each other. You want there to be less death and starvation. You want the economy to improve. You want, well, you want a lot of things but they are all reasonable things and none of them outranks all the other things you want so much that you can ignore them. When you have political beliefs, it’s not because “this is my terminal value” but just because “this makes the world better off overall.” If you’re right wing (ha) you think personal responsibility is good, because that makes people satisfied with their life and grows the economic pie. If you’re left wing (more likely) you think giving people their basic economic necessities will reduce their anxieties and make them more willing to trust and get along with other people.
Yes, you can be a Yudkowskian Rationalist and be aiming for super-AIs and conquering the galaxy as the transcendental fate of humanity… but let’s be honest it’s much more likely that you are an Alexandrian Rationalist and just see rationalism as offering some good tools for seeing through the irrational bullshit generated by dumb institutions and rage-fueled culture wars. You kind of want a happy normal life for everyone, and whatever political philosophy you currently hold, it’s because you think that will lead to everyone being better off in many ways.
This is how all the ideologies see each other. This is why @theunitofcaring notices that both MRA’s and SJW’s seem to want the same things. Hell even Nazi’s and Communists basically wanted the same things: a comfortable, stable lifestyle for the average person (defined as either the proletariat, or the volk.)
Where ideology comes in is it tells you that yes, you can have this normal idyllic world with moderate reward for all… once the person who’s ruining it go away. For Nazi ideology, the person ruining everything is the Jew. For Stalinist Communism ideology, that person was the class-traitor. For rationalist ideology, that person ruining things is the lazy bureaucrat who won’t “do the math” (or the tribal culture warrior). In all of these ideologies, the idea that this figure has legitimate differences from the group is dismissed - they must just be greedy or lazy or possessed of some other moral deficiency. And the ideology constructs an intellectual framework that lets you connect the common everyday sins of this person (which are easy to find) and the terror of truly horrible crimes (like betraying a country in war, gross assault, rampant cruelty) which are rarer but devastating. So the Nazi ideology says “that Jew who set up shop next to you was actually part of the conspiracy that turned on us in WW1” and therefore responsible for all the evil in the world: your local competition, the failure of the German state, intra-culture fighting, crime, everything can be pinned on this figure.
Back in the infancy of social media (with the blogs and the livejournals) a common debate was “what do libertarians believe”, since there seemed as many different dogmas of libertarianism as there were trolls in the comments section arguing for them. Does a libertarian concern themselves only with government rules, or all forms of power? Do they want a government that can strictly enforce some rights (like private property)? Do they want a slim, efficient government where one CEO-like person makes decisions, or do they want a close-to-the-roots government where many local legislatures are responsive to the people? Is legalizing pot the most important, or getting lower taxes? It just wasn’t clear what saying “I’m a libertarian” meant – except it was pretty clear it meant *something*. Is liberty a deontic goal - something we should value for its own sake - or a consequentialist goal - whereby larger goals could be better accomplished by maximizing liberty. All these proponents had some sort of liberty thing in common, we just couldn’t tell what.
And that was an ideological explanation; libertarianism is the belief that every “real” problem, no matter how big or small, is caused by people restricting the liberty of others - in ways both big and small. So that teacher who banned a book in school is responsible for rising crime, or the minimum wage is part of the reason no one you know makes rational decisions. You’re not 100% sure what “freedom” is, but you do know that saving it from people who want to limit it is the most important goal of your life. And if you succeed, that will make everything better - the economy, crime, your daily life, harmonious relations between your neighbors, etc.
I understand TUOC (and somewhat @balioc) that it’s tempting to say these ideologies want the same thing and can hopefully find a way to work together for them. But the explanatory phenomenon are really important. They are the things people are defining their entire identity and praxis around. Without that part of ideology the world doesn’t even make any sense. Getting people to give that part up is psychologically wrenching
I…don’t think this is right, at its heart. Differences in terminal values end up driving huge amounts of social, cultural, and political conflict.
Yeah, it’s true that there are also differences in instrumental values. Everyone wants More Prosperity, but social democrats believe empirically that Policy X will get you More Prosperity, while tradcons favor Policy Y and libertarians favor Policy Z for the same purpose. And, yeah, it’s also true that people arrive at those “empirical” positions, and defend them, largely for the sake of tribal belonging and ego-maintenance. All this seems uncontroversial.
But that gets you only so far. And a lot, a lot, a lot of preference differences get covered up by empty phrases like “giving people happy normal lives” and “making the world a better place.”
When Bob the Caricature Tradcon imagines utopia, he imagines a world of happy close-knit (nuclear) families where fathers work hard at Breadwinner Jobs, where children are respectful…and where pretty much everyone observes the same customs, enjoys the same kind of art, lives by the same norms of interaction. These things are not incidental. These things are not “oh, I have an empirical belief that this is what makes people the happiest, but I’d revise that if the right data came in.” These things are the constituent parts of a pretty mental picture, and that picture is the terminal goal.
When Alice the Caricature SJW imagines utopia, she imagines a world containing lots of sexual and racial groups being conspicuously diverse and different, so that everyone else can be conspicuously Woke about engaging with them. Probably there’s a lot less family in general, and what family there is is less hierarchical. Probably there’s a lot less Breadwinner Work. Probably there’s a lot more fanfiction and hipster theater and cuddle-puddling. And, again, the realization of this vision constitutes a terminal goal for the world.
Both of these people will say that they just want for everyone to be happy and fulfilled. But, when they do, they’re using the same words to disguise meanings that are actually very different. Their values are not really compatible.
I mean, in theory they are, sort of. (The theory in question is @slatestarscratchpad‘s “Archipelago.”) You can have Tradcon Land over in North Carolina and SJW Land across the border in Virginia, or whatever. But this requires a sort of overarching suite of classical-liberal values, a sense that being “happy and fulfilled” really just means You Do You. Which probably is not what’s really going on in either Alice’s brain or Bob’s brain. When Bob sees a purple-haired trans sex worker with a Minority Studies degree living in a group house in the Big City and writing about Marvel superheroes kissing…he’s going to think “this person is fucked up, this person’s life is being wasted, this person has been failed by society, this person is definitely not happy and fulfilled,” and there are no protestations and no data that are really going to change his mind, because the root of his model doesn’t much care about those things. Alice is likely to be just as skeptical about the cookie-baking housewife in the suburbs.
(Or, uh, to take a sillier but punchier example – there’s a reason that straight people generally don’t want to take the magic bisexuality pill, despite its obvious usefulness for advancing widespread goals like “basic interpersonal satisfaction.”)
The root of power lies in finding ways to manipulate the stories and images from which terminal values are built.