Why ideologies threaten progress
Their world view undermines the results-based, small-scale experimentation that makes humans flourish.
The following is an excerpt from my book From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement. You can purchase discounted copies of my book at my website, or pay full prize at Amazon.
See also my other articles and podcasts on Ideology:
Why Ideologies Threaten Progress (Part 1 of 3-part podcast series)
Where do ideologies come from? (podcast)
Why ideologies fail (podcast)
I believe that ideological movements in wealthy Western nations are the most serious threats to future progress. In particular, ideological movements within the United States, which has been the engine of progress for the last century-and-a-half, are concerning.
Though radical ideologies seem very different from each other, they reflect the same mentality. Ideologues on both the right and left divide everyone into groups based upon some demographic characteristic. The group might be based upon ethnicity, race, class, gender, religion, sexuality or nationality. Each group is designated as either “good” or “bad.” In their world individuals do not exist; only groups. The actual characteristics of individuals within each group are irrelevant.
The “bad” groups typically are successful people, while “good” groups are less successful. Ideologues believe that the bad people achieved their success by doing bad things to the unsuccessful. And the good people have done poorly because of the terrible things that bad people have done to them in the present or recent past.
The goal of the government, in their view, is to punish the successful group while boosting up the unsuccessful group. Progress, to the extent that they believe in it, consists of redistribution, punishment and shame.
As we have seen, this is an extraordinarily inaccurate and dangerous view of human history. Different outcomes between people are largely accounted for by geographical variations in the distant past, which constrained food production. How a society acquired its food, in turn, structured their entire society. This resulted in some societies being able to innovate new technologies, skills and social organizations and others to not be able to. People that were lucky enough to have “good” geography have been successful, while those that had “bad” geography stagnated in poverty for millennia.
Rather than hate the successful, we should feel fortunate that a few societies have been able to break out of those geographical constraints. We should also feel fortunate that Industrial societies have innovated technologies, skills and organizations that enable less successful people to finally overcome their historical constraints.
For the first time in history, less successful people can go from poverty to progress by copying more successful people in one generation. Less successful people and those who pretend to speak for them should be grateful that finally a way out of millennia of poverty has been created. All they need to do is copy the successful.
Ideologues preach a shortcut for what the right government policies can do to help the less successful. But there are no shortcuts. The only proven strategy for success is to copy what has already worked. Dreaming up better pathways to success will lead us nowhere.
Ideologues on both the left and right claim to speak for certain groups and know what is best for them. In reality, they preach policies and attitudes that doom that group and all others. If we focus all our efforts on resenting the successful and punishing them, we hurt everyone, particularly less successful groups.
While ideologues on both the right and left claim to be able to see the world more clearly than everyone else, their ideas are merely the intellectualization of anger and resentment. This anger and resentment colors everything they see and distorts their entire view of history and the human condition. That anger and resentment harm every individual or group that adopts their views. That anger and resentment are key threats to progress for all of mankind.
The goal of many of these ideologues is to provoke anger and resentment among the less successful, and shame among the more successful. They believe those powerful emotions will provoke sudden action that creates a better world.
But we already know how to create a better world. Our goal should be to maintain the preconditions that enable the vast, decentralized problem-solving network to solve problems every day. The powerful emotions provoked by ideologues undermine the network because they undermine the ability to cooperate and copy others based upon what works.
While we need positive thinking to keep progress going, ideologies emphasize the negative. There is an enormous amount of evidence that optimists, as long as they are also grounded in reality, are far more successful than pessimists. Pessimism can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy as it constantly throws up psychological barriers that discourage action.
While future progress needs people to understand their individual role in promoting success, both for themselves and all of society, ideology encourages people to portray themselves as victims held back by other groups. This victim mentality encourages people to ignore what they have accomplished or, more importantly, what they can accomplish regardless of whatever barriers exist.
While progress requires keeping an open mind, a thirst for knowledge and a willingness to copy what works, ideology closes the mind. Ideology creates the false perception that the world is very simple, it is well understood and all problems are subject to quick fixes. Ideologues believe that solutions already exist, and all that is required is the moral conviction to implement them.
While progress requires that institutions experiment with widely differing solutions, ideology encourages a group-think mentality. Ideologues believe that all good ideas come from within their group and that everyone outside that group lacks the necessary intelligence, courage or moral conviction.
Ideological movements also gradually shut down differences of opinion within the group. This creates a self-limiting dynamic, a downward spiral of conformity that ultimately undermines every ideological movement.
While progress requires that different people with different views and skills focus on solving different problems, ideology encourages the belief that we only have to get rid of the people who are interfering with the implementation of the correct policies. Ideologues believe that we already know what works; we just have to have the moral conviction to implement them over the protests of less enlightened people.
While progress requires problem-solvers who experiment with different solutions, ideologues encourage people to believe that the world is divided between those who speak the truth and those who speak lies.
While progress requires that people constantly compare the current situation with the actual alternatives in existence, ideologues compare reality to a pure vision that only exists in their heads. Reality can never compare favorably to a vision that does not exist. In visions, all trade-offs and conflicting interests disappear into the void of perfection.
But when we compare our reality with what has existed in the past, our current situation does not look so bad. In fact, it looks pretty darn good. An understanding of previous progress can be an incentive to keep working on future progress.
While progress requires practical problem-solvers, ideologies encourage grand visions. Practical solutions to make society just a little better are of no interest to ideologues. Only dramatic transformations are acceptable.
While progress requires that we divert resources towards solutions that will make people's lives better, ideologues wish to divert a huge proportion of our resources towards implementing a utopian vision. Ultimately, that vision can never be achieved and the attempt to do so will waste valuable resources that could be used to solve more practical problems.
While progress requires an understanding of history to learn what works and what previous attempts have failed, ideologues have strong amnesia. History is rewritten as a series of noble failures that would have worked if only “bad” people did not sabotage them. Ideologues believe that their next attempt will have better results. And the very real progress that came from more pragmatic experimentation is completely ignored.
While progress requires a wide variety of opinions, ideology encourages people to shut down differing opinions. The assumption is that a diversity of opinions being voiced only slows down the “correct” policies from being implemented. The more logical the argument of those differing opinions, the more important it is to shut those opinions down.
While progress requires small-scale experimentation and constant iteration based on results, ideology encourages people to ignore results. Because ideologues view the world as a moral struggle between the righteous and the evil, results do not matter. In particular, whether a policy works or not is trivial in comparison to the intentions of the people who originally implemented those policies.
While progress requires decentralization of power so that political, economic and religious elites do not warp experimentations for their self-interest, ideologues seek to centralize power. For ideologues, this makes perfect sense because they believe morality dictates very clear action. Decentralization of power only interferes with the ability of the ideologues to implement their grand visions.
Ideologues fundamentally misunderstand the causes of progress. They apparently believe that the world improves when those who are more enlightened than the rest of us take a public stand and attempt to persuade others through moral argument. As the persuaded become the majority, then the government will adopt policies that make the world a better place.
Ideologues promise shortcuts that enable entire peoples to suddenly jump to another type of society. There is no evidence from history that this is possible. Even worse, they undermine what does work: the vast decentralized problem-solving network that is a modern society.
When ideologues first attempt to seize power, they focus on youth groups and education. Their goal is to thoroughly indoctrinate the next generation so that they cannot even conceive of another viewpoint. The Nazis did this via the Hitler Youth. The Communists did this via the Pioneers and Komsomol.
Teaching children that the best means of achieving progress is political activism and loyalty to the state inflicts terrible damage. Rather than learning the skills and values necessary to flourish in modern society, ideologues teach that the successful achieve their success via exploitation and privilege. Their project will inevitably fail to transform society for the better, but it will cause a great deal of suffering before it collapses.
Ideologues cannot see that progress comes from very mundane individual actions. Progress comes from children and young adults learning skills that are valued in the marketplace, by perfecting those skills by working years at a trade, by cooperating with others in an organization, and by moving to geographical regions that offer greater economic opportunities and teaching those skills and values to their children.
Progress also comes from engineers designing products that are just a little bit better than last year’s model, by entrepreneurs founding new businesses to innovate new products and more effective business models, by managers who help to scale up fledgling businesses into enterprises capable of competing on the world marketplace, and by skilled workers solving the little problems required in implementing new technologies, skills and social organizations.
All of this happens organically when the right conditions exist. As we have seen in previous chapters, some of these conditions are geographic, some are political, and many are technological.
Government policy plays a role in this, but far less than many imagine. Most of the policies that promote progress are very mundane and do little to excite political activists: investments in vaccinations, preventative medicine, sanitation, transportation, energy, education in basic literacy and numeracy as well as specialized engineering and entrepreneurial skills.
The big social programs that take up huge amounts of funding do relatively little in comparison, except to redistribute the gains of progress. Indeed the funding of these programs is dependent upon the economic development that progress generates.
Ideologues have a strong self-interest in society not believing in the progress that I am discussing in this book. Think about it. If everyone believed that the world is better than ever, it will likely continue to get better in the future and there is relatively little that government can do to improve the situation, why would anyone support radical politics?
Belief in progress is an existential threat to any radical movement, so they must promote a view of modern society that is dark and pessimistic. They know that they must promote a fear of the future, so they can portray themselves as the protectors of society. They realize that pessimism and fear are key to their achieving power.
See also my other articles and podcasts on Ideology:
Why Ideologies Threaten Progress (Part 1 of 3-part podcast series)
Where do ideologies come from? (podcast)
Why ideologies fail (podcast)
The above is an excerpt from my book From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement. You can purchase discounted copies of my book at my website, or pay full prize at Amazon.
