Thursday, January 04, 2007

Ideology in a nutshell

If you spend much time on internet debate fora, you’ve probably seen the following exchange take place:

Atheist: All the great atrocities of history are the direct fault of religion!

Christian: What about Nazism and Stalinism? Wasn’t Stalin an atheist? Isn’t atheism responsible for atrocities too?

Atheist: That just proves my point, because Nazism and Stalinism were kind of like religions too!

Clearly there’s a problem here. The problem is that the atheists who make this claim are (just like everyone else in internet debate fora) just a bunch of monkeys who want to fling their poo at the other monkey tribe. They’ve decided that the other monkey tribe is the “religion” tribe, and so naturally they have to prove that everything bad is somehow the fault of some ill-defined thing called “religion.’

If you’re really interested in figuring out why atrocities happen- instead of just using the death of six million Jews as a stick to beat anonymous people on the internet with- you’ll forget silly labels like “religion” and ask what the followers of Torquemada, Hitler, and Stalin had in common. I personally think it’s something that I will, for the sake of argument, call ideology.

For purposes of this discussion, I’m going to define “ideology” as the belief that a single idea or system of ideas has already provided us with all the answers. And as it turns out, the book The Truth Machine by James L. Halperin happens to provide an example of ideology in a macrocosm. Halperin has few if any followers who are as enthusiastic as he is, and he seems pretty harmless (for now…) but by golly, is he ever convinced that he already has the answers to everything. His book posits that in the next decade or so we will be able to build a 100% reliable lie detector (the “truth machine” of the title,) and it will, by its very nature, automatically solve all our problems and produce a utopia. Clearly this belief is reasonable: we already live in an era in which neither computers nor airplanes ever crash, banks never make mistakes, and election machines are never rigged, so why not believe that we can build a lie detector which will never, ever fail under any circumstances? Halperin takes his idea very seriously, even going to far as to recommend that people send copies of his novel to their Senators, in the hopes of starting a “Manhattan Project” aimed at producing a working truth machine.

It would be one thing if Halperin argued, for example, that a 99% reliable lie detector would cut down the crime rate, since police could reliably interrogate suspects. But what he actually argues is that we will have a 100% effective lie detector that will cut the crime rate to zero. What about crimes of passion, committed without regard for the consequences? What about serial killers with no connection to their victims- how will the police find suspects to interrogate? No matter- the truth machine will revolutionize psychotherapy, too, so there will be no more crimes of passion or serial killers. Remember, in order to be 100% effective, the truth machine must not only detect conscious deceit, but must also alert the interrogator whenever the subject is lying to himself. In Halperin’s view, psychotherapists will hook their clients to the machine and force them to face the truth about themselves, with the result that everyone will end up consummately well adjusted. But if someone is in denial, won’t they just declare that their therapist’s truth machine is broken? Don’t be silly- everyone knows the machine is absolutely 100% foolproof. And besides, when they claim the truth machine is broken, it will immediately brand them as a liar for saying so!

You might at this point wonder whether the truth machine would unleash a nightmare of political repression, in which the government audits people’s minds, looking for subversive thoughts. But don’t be silly! Presidential candidates would be audited by truth machine, so everyone would know which candidates planned to ban subversive thoughts. But couldn’t the government use a rigged truth machine, which would let them conceal their plans? No, silly- the truth machine is 100% reliable! But what if the public wanted the government to go after people with unpopular views? No, because the truth machine will put an end to cheating in schools, so everyone will have to study hard, and everyone will make an A in civics class, and will understand that political repression is bad. (No, I am not making this up. Halperin actually argues this.)

Halperin has already illustrated the first principle of ideology. The ideology has to do everything. The truth machine can’t just verify that people are testifying accurately in court. It has to eliminate all crimes, all mental illness, all cheating in schools, all marital problems, all political repression, in short, every problem society has. This is the same thing we saw, on a more tragic scale, in Lysenkoism. The Soviets believed that not only did Marxism hold the answers to questions of economics, but it had all the answers to questions of genetics as well. So, they bred new strains of wheat according to “Marxist” genetics, producing a predictable famine.

Halperin’s book also illustrates the second principle of ideology: the ideology may create problems, but it claims to solve every problem it creates. This leads to chains of reasoning in which a problem is solved by the ideology, thereby producing another problem, which is also solved by the ideology, inadvertently producing another problem, which is also solved by the ideology, and so on, until finally the ideology solves the last problem, and the ideologue declares victory. And yet, if the chain breaks at any point, all the problems come crashing down on our heads, and we have no solutions. Think of the example of political repression. What if eliminating cheating doesn’t enable every kid to make an A? (After all, most of them can’t make an A even when they do cheat.) What if the government- or FOX news, for that matter- does produce a rigged truth machine? What if psychotherapy doesn’t work the way Halperin thinks it does, and a frustrated populace decides to take out their frustrations on homosexuals, or socialists, or atheists? You can see the same chain of reasoning at work most clearly in libertarianism. Libertarians keep telling me that the answer is to throw all government restraints to the wind, and let everything sort itself out. But what happens when landlords are allowed to discriminate on the basis of race? No problem. No rational landlord will discriminate, so long as he can make money renting to racial minorities. But historically, hasn’t the absence of antidiscrimination law led to landlords gouging racial minorities? Yes, but only because society wasn’t libertarian enough. Real libertarianism, we are told, will produce a boom in the housing market that will make housing affordable for all, eliminating the gouging of minorities. But what if the boom in the housing market allows local landlords to become so rich and powerful that they can corner the housing market, and they decide to gouge? Simple: minorities are free to move to a different city, where the local landlords don’t discriminate. But what if they don’t have enough money to move to a new city? Don’t be silly- libertarianism will make everyone so rich that they can freely move cross-country to whatever city suits their desires.

The third principle of ideology should be obvious at this point: whenever the ideology fails, its failure is attributed to a lack of ideological purity. When I point out to libertarians that Marcus Garvey tried to put their recommendations into action, in the absence of antidiscrimination law, and failed because racist whites sabotaged his businesses, they retort that no true libertarian would sabotage someone’s business, and that in a truly libertarian society Garvey would have succeeded. If the Soviet Union wasn’t the utopia promised by Marx, that’s just because true Marxism hasn’t been tried yet. And if the government used a rigged truth machine to cover its wrongdoing as it jailed subversive thinkers, Halperin could just declare that a rigged truth machine isn’t 100% foolproof, and therefore his ideology hasn’t been tested. Never mind that the reason their ideologies haven’t been put into practice is because they are so deeply flawed as to be utterly unworkable. Their very impossibility shields them from disproof in the mind of the ideologue. And this is precisely why Halperin has to posit such stellar performance on the part of the truth machine. If it only detected conscious attempts at deliberate deceit, it wouldn’t be absolutely, positively, 100% effective, and his ideology would fall apart. So, he posits that it catches every unconscious act of self-deceit as well.

Lastly, we come to our original question: why does ideology lead to atrocity? The answer is simple. Ideologues believe that their ideology already has the answers. It can solve all problems. And if it ever fails, it’s because people didn’t embrace the ideology enthusiastically enough. Embracing the ideology 99% may have already thrown us into hell, but that’s only because we failed to achieve the 100% that would take us to heaven.

Naturally, anyone who disagrees with the ideology will only hold us back at 99%. They are dangerous, and must be eliminated.

Remember the Muslim general who ordered the destruction of the Library of Alexandria:

A book that disagrees with the Koran is blasphemous.

A book that agrees with the Koran is superfluous.

Burn them all.

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