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Comment by oroul | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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.

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?

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

> You can't imagine govt policies that kill people but do not save anyone in return?

Maybe, but I certainly can't reduce my thinking about ideology to considering an example featuring comic villains.

I'd call that a "no", actually. Or just a bad faith argument.

I left it vague so people of both sides could relate to how it fits the other side's hypocrisy. But I suppose this also allows people who are looking for a fight to imagine that it fits their own hypocrisy and get defensive.

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.

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.

> 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.

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