Ideological Derangement
How politics makes us crazy
Why are so few libertarians vegan?
There’s no inherent contradiction between the ideas. The argument for veganism is “you shouldn’t harm others a lot for small benefits,” not “you shouldn’t harm others a lot for small benefits—and also taxes are great.” And yet relatively few people with libertarian political dispositions refrain from consuming animal products.
The explanation, I submit, is ideology. The libertarian worldview holds that many problems are the byproduct of untoward government mischief-making. The libertarian carefully searches for harms of government. This often leads them to neglect other forms of injustice, even ones that don’t explicitly conflict with libertarianism.
We have all witnessed political partisans twist themselves up in pretzels trying to deny that harm has come from their side of the aisle. Upton Sinclair famously said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” It is likewise difficult to get a man to understand something when it requires admitting that his side is in the wrong.
Ideology doesn’t just affect our direct beliefs. It affects which things we’re attuned to. The world is filtered through the lens of our ideology. This often leads us to overfocus on harms caused by those things that we are particularly ideologically disposed to notice, neglecting those that don’t fit neatly into our ideology. And this holds even if our ideology gives us no reason to ignore those harms. Libertarian political commitments have no direct implications concerning the badness of factory farming. Nevertheless, in practice, they affect one’s assessment of it.
Abundance—by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson—discussed ways government policy could make goods more affordable and abundant. They propose eliminating housing restrictions, so that more houses could be built and prices lowered. Many of their fiercest opponents were leftists. Often, the responses to their book would contain bizarre non sequiturs, suggesting that the “real reason” housing prices were high was corporate greed.
Consider the above Tweet by Sirota. On its face, his complaint is bizarre. He cites a study saying that consolidation raises home prices and suggests that this refutes the Abundance thesis that housing regulations lead to high home prices. But more than one thing can raise housing prices. This would be like arguing that famine doesn’t kill many people by citing a study on mortality from smoking. It would be one thing if this were a one-off, but some variant of this criticism was the primary left-wing criticism of Abundance. What’s going on?
Obviously believing that burdensome regulations raise housing prices doesn’t conflict with leftist ideology. Presumably there is some degree of regulatory interference that would—even according to leftists—drive up housing prices. If the government required everyone who builds a house to hire 5,000 Hula dancers to dance on the property before beginning construction, that would obviously increase housing prices. Whether that degree actually exists in the real world is an empirical question. So on its face, it seems a bit puzzling that leftists are so unwilling to blame regulations for high housing prices.
But once we remember that ideology isn’t just about explicit beliefs, but broad narratives, it’s easy to diagnose this. Leftists are used to blaming problems on corporate greed. When problems are blamed on things other than corporations, leftists will often be driven by ideology to downplay those other things and blame corporations. This tendency even led some authors to badly misreport what studies actually said in order to argue against the Abundance thesis.
All too often, ideology turns us into hammers in search of nails. Insofar as some problem doesn’t fit neatly into our ideology, it is disregarded. Communists rush to defend every communist leader—or to blame their malfeasance on capitalism—because ostensible communists doing terrible things doesn’t fit neatly into their ideology. Anti-imperialists often rush to blame misconduct on American foreign policy and whitewash the crimes of foreign leaders. Though they recognize abstractly that evil was not a recent invention of the American foreign policy establishment, blaming things on foreigners with dark skin doesn’t fit as well with their picture of the world.
This tendency is not exclusively a leftist phenomenon. It is a risk we all face. For example, I recently saw a Tweet from Chris Rufo about USAID cuts:
This seemed like a particularly acute example of ideological derangement. A core tenet of the Rufo worldview seems to be that many horrible things come from liberals denying dark truths. This may be true, but it has no direct implications for the desirability of foreign aid. Treating this as exculpatory of Musk’s actions requires thinking both:
Liberals are generally unaware of the dysfunctionality of foreign countries that receive foreign aid.
The dysfunctionality of recipients of foreign aid means that foreign aid is undesirable.
But neither of these is true, and they’re certainly not clearly true. Instead of seriously looking at costs and benefits, Rufo simply repeated some tenet of his ideology and vaguely gestured at it having serious implications for the foreign aid cuts. He has regressed from a thinking creature into a simplistic GPT-2-esque pattern matcher.
Similarly, libertarians will often underestimate the number of lives saved by foreign aid programs. Because they are used to inefficient and sclerotic government programs mucking things up, in the rare cases where government functions well, their ideology prejudices them into not seeing this.
Or consider those religious thinkers who declare that AI is not conscious because the soul is immaterial and AI is made of physical stuff. Now, a moment’s reflection on this argument reveals its spuriousness. The brain is also a physical object, but it gives rise to consciousness. Why, then, can’t AI?
Here, the religious thinker has become blinded by ideology. They are so used to criticizing materialism that they erroneously assume that belief in AI sentience requires materialist assumptions. They are so used to attacking materialism that they treat an unrelated view as a proxy in their broader ideological war against materialism. Like Rufo, they have replaced thinking with mere pattern matching.
This is a risk that we all face, including me. If I had to summarize my ideology in a sentence, it would be something like “many of the world’s biggest problems stem from wholesale neglect of large classes of conscious beings.” I thus may be prone to overestimate harms that come from a constricted moral circle and underestimate harms from improperly designed institutions. Similarly, because I am on the political left, it is very likely that I have a general tendency to overestimate the badness of right-wing policies and underestimate the badness of left-wing ones.
Why is this tendency so dangerous?
One reason is the obvious one: it leads to us having systematically false and distorted beliefs about the world—thinking some problems are bigger than they are and other problems are smaller. One who only detects badness when it fits neatly into one’s own ideology will inevitably ignore many terrible things.
But there is another reason that may be more significant. Many of the world’s most serious problems don’t fit neatly into many ideologies. Take, as an example, the fact that mirror bacteria may be developed and cause the extinction of life on Earth. This isn’t particularly aligned with any ideology. Mirror bacteria are neither Muslim, transgender, Israeli, nor Trump supporters. Neither populism, conservatism, nor leftism has anything special to say about these rogue pathogens. They’re just bad. But insofar as we only focus on harms that correspond with our ideology, we will ignore those things which are just plain bad.
Gaza is ideological. Endless ink is spilled discussing it. Sudan and car crashes are not ideological. As a result, they are almost completely ignored (except in the rare cases when their existence becomes a convenient political football—e.g. when pro-Israel advocates suggest that anti-semitism explains why people excessively fixate on Gaza). The world is full of opportunities to make things better. Yet we cannot do so if we all ignore problems without an ideological tilt.
This is one thing I appreciate about effective altruism’s cause neutrality. Rather than only working on problems that fit within some specific ideology, effective altruists try to identify the problems where they can make the biggest difference. Malaria is unsexy and non-ideological, but that makes it no less horrible. When a child dies in her mother’s arms, her mother takes no solace in the fact that her child’s death is not a convenient American culture-war football.
To the extent we wish to avoid ideological derangement, we ought to focus on the biggest problems in the world and the areas where we can do the most good. Sometimes this corresponds with our ideology. Other times it does not. Political views describe what we see as the legitimate role of government. To treat them as totalizing accounts of all that matters in the world is to become blind to many of the biggest problems and to become systematically ideologically deranged. The world does not owe us, and rarely provides us, problems that fit neatly into pre-arranged ideological categories.
You need to consider Walter Block's argument:
1. Libertarianism doesn’t say that p.
2. Therefore, ~p.
See also: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/reply-to-walter-block-on-ethical
I consider myself quasi-libertarian :)