Reasonable People

When most bloggers talk about ideology or ideological people, they are talking about the extremists. They have in mind some activist who’s read a lot of theory and is always saying radical stuff about revolution or something outside the box of normal politeness (like “all sex is rape”.) It’s true that taken literally these people say a lot of things that could hurt the vast majority of humanity. You can usually pick apart their arguments easily, for they are either poorly thought out or rely on assumptions most people would not be willing to agree with.

I’m not actually interested in those extremists.

Because, there are always extremists, arguing for basically any perspective. The campus feminist is a figure going back over half a century, and it certainly was prominent in the nineties. And you won’t ever find a time when some right wing edgelord wasn’t saying we should have a king with absolute dictatorial powers. There is always some person arguing for far out ideology, and you’re never going to stamp them out.

What is fascinating to me is the reasonable people. The vast majority who don’t think of themselves as holding any “out there” political opinions, and who look down on revolution or extremism as too risky. They just see themselves as holding up the same normal, common sense morality everyone else feels, or should.

There’s nothing “natural” about their positions though - the “normal” opinion is affected by cultural change as much as any extremist. Which is why the positions of campus feminism in the nineties became the positions of all “decent” upstanding citizens in the modern era.

The extremists you usually can argue with. As SSC points out, the extremists have no other options. But once “reasonable people” have a moral opinion, they enforce it brutally. They do not want to talk about it, they consider their opinion on formerly controversial issues now a “solved” discussion, closed for debate. And if you’re labeled a dissenter to that, your life is basically over. The reasonable people control all social discourse.

(There were always neocons who wanted the US to pave the mideast. What was really scary was the post 9/11 environment that made even questioning the sources of terrorism into something that would get you shunned from decent society.)

There may be an inferential gap here. To anyone who hasn’t experienced, it’s hard to express how scary it is when you have an opinion you think is acceptable, and everyone insists it’s just not allowed to be discussed. When people you respect are blithely ignoring their most fundamental principles because “this is the way everyone does it now” and with no further explanation.

Extremists at least usually feel they have to justify themselves.

I suspect though, that anyone reading this tumblr has felt something like that. You shouldn’t be afraid of the radical saying they want to “kill all the X.” You should be afraid when “well of course some X will die” becomes the sad song of the common man.

I’m super interested in how this happens. It’s not like there’s some great evidence-based debate and one side wins, and everyone agrees to accept that side as Correct now. And just saying “it’s cultural” sounds very superficial for a mind-virus that causes people to ignore and forget their most deeply stated principles. So that’s why I want to figure out “how ideology works.” Not the ideology of extremist provacateurs, but the ideology of normal people who never ask themselves how they justify their beliefs.

A second level of that is how even these reasonable people, when cornered one on one, will admit their ideology should be tempered by compassion and skepticism and consideration of other points of view. Most humans are very, very good at saying “well I don’t buy into the whole ideology, I just think it has some good points.”

But when these people operate as a group, then the forgiveness or skepticism seems impossible to find. Institutions just don’t know how to use such fuzzy concepts, and the institutions become much more ideological tools than the messy humans ever could be. So I’m really interested in how ideologies function above the level of the individual.

I suppose all this self-defining and goal-setting is not interesting to anyone on tumblr. You’ll read my posts and enjoy them on their own merit, or they won’t.

So if you need some closing message here its: worry less about the extremists, both on the other side and your own. Pay more attention to the unspoken agreement among the “reasonable people” for things that make no fuggin sense.