Hello World!

This blog is dedicated to investigating how people find different views of reality, and how these different views lead to human conflict. That is, it will look at ideas in different ideologies, and how the adherence to these ideas leads to antagonism between both individuals and groups of people. These conflicts can be as harmless as a heated conversation between two people, as (relatively) nonviolent but consequential as a national political campaign, or as horrendous as war and genocide. The larger and more consequential a conflict is, the more likely that it is fueled by differences in the ideas of the protagonists.

In recent years, the word ideology has acquired a kind of pejorative sense. I have met many over my lifetime who feel that an ideology is something that generates extreme and destructive behavior. An ideology is regarded as something that a totalitarian state uses to justify its crimes. Some feel that an ideology is an unrealistic or idealistic vision of reality.  Yet, every one of us who is not an extreme skeptic possesses an ideology. The dictionary definition of ideology is that it is a system of ideas and values. An archaic use of the word was that an ideology is the science of ideas and how they originate. Anyone who has a set of ideas on the nature of the reality around us, hopefully half-way coherent, has an ideology.

The purpose of this site, then, is to look at the different views of reality that people possess and how they come into being. The individual ideologies are of great interest in themselves, but they are not really the most interesting part of this. What is truly fascinating is how  different ideologies interact and bring people into conflict. And even more important is to compare the claims of the ideologies against actual data and historical experience. We have few duties more sacred than to make the models of reality that we have in our head more congruent with actual reality. Socrates is reputed to have said that the unexamined life is not worth living.

When undertaking such a study, I think it very important to keep in mind that one’s opponent on the other side is not necessarily evil. A Democrat may think that his Republican opponent is evil and racist for opposing the welfare programs he champions, and the Republican might think that his Democratic foe is evil for putting poor people in a condition where they can not lift themselves out of poverty. However, they are quite possibly both wrong; the reason for their opposition lies more likely in the different models of reality in their heads.

I do not deny that there are other causes of conflict than differing perceptions of reality. There are thieves who allow their greed to motivate them to commit crimes against others; there are those who hunger for power enough to harm others. What I do believe is that these kinds of conflicts have a much smaller impact on society than the disputes that arise from different ideas. You might object that this last statement is more of a gut feeling on my part than an accurate perception of reality. Then your perception of reality conflicts with mine and we must oppose each other. I would probably respond to you that the ideologies of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, and Pol Pot led them to murder millions of people.  So how can we tell which view of reality, yours or mine, is more accurate? I would argue that the evidence of historical experience should offer much of the answer. Another piece of evidence could be offered by the self-consistency of a system of ideas, although self-consistency itself would not in itself be a proof. After all an ideology can be totally self-consistent but all its premises might be wrong. However, two ideologies that can both claim some agreement with historical experience, with one a lot more self-consistent, would favor the more self-consistent. But, what would be of greatest weight is historical experience.

In the modern western world most antagonisms have been generated by ideas about economics and politics.  Nevertheless, one can still find hostilities in the world generated by differences in religion. One merely has to recall the complete hostility of moslem jihadists to western civilization to be convinced of this. Even so, because of my proclivities, I will probably spend more time commenting on differing economic and political ideas. As a retired physicist I find economic phenomena absolutely fascinating as a more complex type of many-body problem. Of course, the particles in the statistical mechanics of physics interact much more simply than the “particles” interacting in an economic system, which are individual human beings.

Finally, I would like to offer a disclaimer. My own ideology would be called conservative by most, especially as it applies to economics. I am much more compelled by the ideas of J.B. Say, Carl Menger, and Friedrich Hayek than I am by those of John Maynard Keynes, Paul Samuelson, and Joseph Stiglitz. For those who hold exactly the opposite ideology, I invite you to ideological combat by posting comments on what I write here.