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> 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'. |