[johnNumen]

The author seems bright and I'm sure he realizes this, but it is of course true that (what I assume to be) the premise of his article--that individual thriving is most important--is itself a core component of modern liberal ideology.

[tablespoon]

> The author seems bright and I'm sure he realizes this, but it is of course true that (what I assume to be) the premise of his article--that individual thriving is most important--is itself a core component of modern liberal ideology.

Yeah, exactly. Ideology is baked into pretty much everything, so when you try to get away from it, you end up just finding the ideology that's so core to you that you don't even (fully) realize what it is.

The other thing to watch out for is people who push "non-ideological" solutions. They're usually just trying to bake their own ideology into that unexamined part of your brain.

[oroul]

> Ideology is inescapable. To some extent, everyone is under its influence. But that does not mean that all are equally ideological

The author makes this point very plainly. The 'well it's all ideology anyway' take is reductive and uses relativism to (poorly) justify people supporting ideas that are harmful to both themselves and to society.

In the same way that acknowledging that human conflict is inevitable doesn't justify violence, the existence of ideology doesn't justify structuring one's entire life around it.

[geysersam]

> justify people supporting ideas that are harmful to both themselves and to society.

Harmful according to whom? It's safe to assume people don't support ideas they think are harmful to themselves and society.

What irks me is that the "ideology is intrinsically bad" idea is historically firmly part of conservative ideology. One early formulation is Burke's criticism of the french revolution.

I think pointing this out is not relativism.

[simplestats]

Harmful according to other ideologies conlficting in the mind of the same person.

You think murder is morally wrong. You think some govt policy is so important that when govt kills people while it is carrying out the policy, the ends justify the means. Ideology is what killed those people.

[pyrale]

Is that a bad trolley problem where you only tell us the consequence of one side of the decision, and then use that to tell us that even thinking about taking that decision is is bad?

[simplestats]

Seems like a loaded question. You can't imagine govt policies that kill people but do not save anyone in return?

[SpicyLemonZest]

I don't think it's an attempt to justify things as much as an attempt to question whether the author is making a real point. He suggests that we should "adopt flexible stances, mixing traditions", rather than "adopting rigid and extreme positions", but almost everyone honestly believes this is what they're doing. (I would argue that "rigid and extreme positions" is just what it looks like from the outside when someone's mixing in a tradition you don't understand.)

I could imagine someone saying that we should strive to live off of vibes, never having or acting on ideas about how the world should be, but he doesn't seem to be arguing that.

[beaconstudios]

But liberal humanism /is/ an ideology and denying that gets you further from the truth. You can accept that as your ideology or you can say "actually this is just factual reality" but then you're being a closed-eyes ideologue just like the author. It's OK to be ideological because ideology is just the axioms you choose. If you think that equality is good or bad (in some specific situation like access to resources) that's an ideological stance. There's no "non ideological" position.

Of course there are better or worse ideologues (and blind ideologues tend to be the most insufferable because they believe they're non ideological but turn out to just be neoliberals), but nobody is non ideological.

[pyrale]

> In the same way that acknowledging that human conflict is inevitable doesn't justify violence, the existence of ideology doesn't justify structuring one's entire life around it.

That analogy is pretty loaded, I think. I doubt people making it would take issue with someone deeply involved in a charitable cause and spending their life to relieve people from their issues. Likewise, I doubt people making that analogy would consider themselves deeply invested in ideology, while, in fact, almost everyone is almost inescapably embedded in a set of dominant ideologies.

[paganel]

> you end up just finding the ideology that's so core to you that you don't even (fully) realize what it is.

I haven't (yet) read him but I think Gramsci wrote about stuff like this in a very detailed way. From the wiki page [1] (because, again, I haven't yet read him, maybe there's a gramscian in here who can come up with better quotes):

> The bourgeoisie, in Gramsci's view, develops a hegemonic culture using ideology, rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the "common sense" values of all and thus maintain the status quo.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci

[novok]

The author recognizes that in the last paragraph:

> Ideology is inescapable. To some extent, everyone is under its influence. But that does not mean that all are equally ideological; thinking people can adopt flexible stances, mixing traditions.

[ahelwer]

Yup. As soon as you think you're "non-ideological" at that point you're fully ensconced in ideology, because your beliefs are so invisible to you that you mistake them for reality. Zizek beats this drum a lot. He did a very entertaining documentary on the subject called The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, examining ideology through the lens of various classic films. You can see a fun excerpt here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVwKjGbz60k

[heurisko]

> Yup. As soon as you think you're "non-ideological" at that point you're fully ensconced in ideology

I don't think this is the case in every instance at all.

I think an individual can strive to scrutinise their beliefs, wrestle with their own conscience and try to come to conclusions based on scientific observation, where appropriate, as much as possible.

A person who is "non ideological" can be just that.

[ahelwer]

People are quite good at lying to themselves about how objective, rational, and scientific their thoughts & opinions are, yes. Science is itself prone to ideology. See people being attracted to beautiful, simple theories.

[heurisko]

Well, the point of the scientific method is that it isn't prone to ideology.

If those beautiful theories don't work, then they're abandoned.

The point remains that there are people who strive to avoid cognitive biases and self delusion, see Cartesian doubt.

The claim to be non ideological doesn't always mean the person is the most ideological. It can just actually mean the person is striving to be non ideological.

[ahelwer]

The scientific method does not give an account of why a given theory must be accepted or rejected. That process is ideological - and no, Popperian Falsification isn’t used, update your understanding of this phenomenon (science) you love so much. Read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and join us in the post-1960 understanding of science.

To give you a taste: if falsification of theories is grounds for rejecting them, all theories must be rejected at all times. There are always - always - some phenomena that are not explicable with current theories. Much of the practice of normal science is in coming up with an explanation of these phenomena using the current theory, not coming up with new theories. Coming up with new theories is an extremely rare practice not done by most scientists. So how do you tell whether a given anomaly will eventually be described by the current theory, or will remain inexplicable until the formation of a new theory? You cannot. New theories also have many more unexplained phenomena when they are first articulated, since not as much work has been put into conforming observation to theory (if that last sentence seems backward to you, you probably don’t know how science is actually practiced). So what grounds does a scientist have for choosing a new anomaly-ridden theory rather than an old anomaly-ridden theory? The process is in part ideological and has nothing - I repeat - NOTHING to do with the scientific method. Emerging theories are chosen by scientists with a high risk tolerance using not a small amount of faith. And many times this bet doesn’t pan out: the theory eventually dies and considerably sets back their career prospects, as all the time they spent conforming observation to theory (again, the practice of normal science) is completely discarded.

The use of “theory” in the above paragraph is probably different from how you think of the meaning of the word. This is analogous to how new theories work: they aren’t just a refinement of previous theories, they actually explain the world in a novel way using different language, occasionally the same words with wildly different definitions (for example, Newtonian mass vs. Einsteinian mass). The author Thomas Kuhn often uses the word “paradigm” in the way I’ve used theory up above to help avoid this confusion. Incidentally, that book is why the term paradigm became popular.

[goodpoint]

THIS! Thanks for saying this.

Claiming to be "non-ideological" is the most ideological statement possible:

not only you have your own ideas but you claim to be "neutral" while seeing everybody else as biased.

[laurent92]

My decisive test to distinguish an idea from an ideology: “Does it matter if a person dies as a result of this idea”

“Does it matter if a poor person dies as a result of not finding a place to be employed in society” => Capitalist ideology

“Does it matter if a person dies as a result of not believing in Jesus” => Christian ideology (as opposed to simply being Christian)

“Does it matter if someone dies as a result of being vaccinated” => No? => Pro-vax ideology.

The opposite is true: “Does it matter if someone dies as a result of Covid” => No? => Antivax ideology.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

People die a lot[1]. If we take the link at face value, 116 a minute. Do we save them all? If so, how? Do we start with biggest troublemakers? If so, Covid might not be THE problem to tackle[2].

[1]https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/deaths-per-day

[2]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/05/how-many-people-die-e...

[lazyasciiart]

Does it matter if a person dies as a result of a decision made twenty years ago? => define “matters”.

[pmarreck]

> “Does it matter if someone dies as a result of being vaccinated” => No? => Pro-vax ideology.

Honest question: Does the fact that the stats say far more people die from the unvaxxed disease than the vax, bear relevance to this?

Because otherwise it seems like you could apply this to anything. "Does it matter if someone dies as a result of being seatbelted?" => No? => Pro-seatbelt ideology

[fellowniusmonk]

Let me try an argument and you can rebut it for my own edification, I'm a younger brother so perhaps view this as an argument by a younger brother who is exploring half formed ideas and trying to engage an older brother so I can be proved wrong (my older brothers usually prove me wrong irl):

Is it ideological to say that discrete minds have equality of type?

If one then says discrete minds with equality are logically treated with equality of type. Is that not a properly basic truth?

1+1 equaling 2 can be argued against (can't evrything) but the onus is on those who argue that 1+1 equals not 2.

Is basic counting ideological? Are all 1's not the same? Would it be strange to treat a 1 as if some particular 1 does not equal 1 or is a superior 1. I think definitions of 1 would have to be tortured to do so.

I'm not saying what 1 ought to do, I'm just saying form follows function, a tree is not equal to a wheel, they do not share similar form or function.

What moral argument does one have for a particular mind to forcibly coerce another mind. What argument is there for a greater 1?

This seems like this would no longer be describing the way reality is but the way someone views it "ought" to be.

I guess one could argue that minds don't have equality on the whole, but I think the burden of proof would have to fall on the person making such a claim. Maybe through the measurements of skull shape someone has irrefutably identified a superior qualia.

[novok]

> Crucially, culture selects at group level, improving the fitness of groups. Because humans organize and compete in groups, successful ideas enhance group performance; the nature of the ideas is irrelevant.

You can be aware of how ideology does sacrifice individual good for group or cultural good, and be happy with that. Being aware of a dynamic doesn't necessarily mean that you support it's implicit values too! For example I don't really think my individual happiness per say is the ultimate good, because I don't last forever, but humanity, in some form, does. It's why I try to be a 'decent human' even when nobody is looking, because a world where people don't act like me is also a shitty place to be. A combination of individual and group preference. In the %20 saints %20 freeloader and %60 status-quo split of a human population, I'd probably be in the %20 saint category.

> Though ideologies define the terms of reality, scholars calling this decontestation, this is necessarily imperfect; reality is irreducibly complex.

Also ideology is ultimately necessary, it's a model of how the world works for an individual too. Even the smartest person needs to reduce reality to a model, since no human can really accurately understand all of it.

> But that does not mean that all are equally ideological; thinking people can adopt flexible stances, mixing traditions. Given the imperfections of ideology, I prefer this approach.

You can also try not to be strongly ideological, even when preferring the group, because it makes you a stronger player 'for the group'.

[Seattle3503]

The author's critique seems mostly aimed at conspicuous ideology; when it becomes a public performance.

[nopenopenopeno]

Bingo. This is just pure liberalism.