Thread by @SteB777

I cannot overstate, just what a problem all ideology is. How it is a mental straight jacket, which has locked us into this globally suicidal path we're on, with the climate and ecological crisis.

We cannot get out of it, with more or better ideology. That is a mental trap.
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https://twitter.com/SteB777/status/1773050672558067803

We, as a culture, have been inculcated to believe, that to change things, we've got to come up with a better idea, a big plan, a new ideology. No, no, that is the mental trap.

Rather, we need a way to see outside this ideological trap. Not to go further down this rabbit hole.
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By ideology, I mean a whole set of interlinked ideas about the world, that appear to explain everything. Where the problems appear to be known, and the solutions appear to be known. Revealed religions are ideologies.
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Ideologies, lock you into seeing the world in a certain way, and stop you seeing outside that ideology. Not only are ideologies cult like, but cults are ideologies.

It is impossible to overstate just how pervasive ideologies have become in our modern culture.
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But let's be very clear about this. Ideologies are not innate to human beings and human thinking. All the ideologies that ever existed, have only come about since the first civilizations and rule by powerful people, in the last 5,000 years or so.
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Modern humans, Homo sapiens, have been around for 2-300,000 years and our very close ancestors much longer. Yes, indigenous cultures, did have world views, but these were nothing like ideologies. Really, all singing and dancing ideologies, only came about with writing.
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In other words, ideologies have been around far less than that 5,000 years, within the last 3,000 years. Except for religions, they only became all-pervading, far more recently. It's no coincidence that we were put on the suicidal course during the last 500 years or so.
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Humans have an evolved weakness, actually several. But we are very vulnerable to the reification fallacy. This is where you mistakenly come to see ideas, as more real, than the reality, these ideas refer to and describe.

8/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reificati…

It cannot be overstated, just what a fatal flaw the reification fallacy is, because the whole globally suicidal course we seem to be locked into with the climate and ecological crisis, is entirely caused by it. Where we can't think outside this locked loop, a death spiral.
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The solution to this predicament is quite simple, a general understanding of the map territory relationship, where the map represents ideas, and the territory, is reality. Where the map is never the territory.

10/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80…

Unfortunately, when I say this, no one understands what I am saying, because people are so inculcated and brainwashed, to believe that ideologies, and big plans are necessary, and everyone understands the world in terms of these.
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Really, this is a very unnatural way of seeing things, and for over 98% of human existence, no one saw the world in terms of a set of interlinked ideas. Ideas were just useful tools, for solving problems, creating new tools. Not a way of seeing the world, through them.
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I won't go in deep here, because I never seem to get anywhere with this, and will just leave this as a marker.

But really, all the unhelpful thinking that has locked us into the climate and ecological crisis, and stops us getting out of this death spiral, is related to it.
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If you talk about the climate crisis, people start going on about technological solutions, renewable energy, their big plans for solving the crisis, EVs, nuclear power, Net Zero plans, NETs, geoengineering etc. All deeply unhelpful.
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None of this addresses the rest of the ecological crisis, the biodiversity crisis. There is absolutely no sense of the ecological big picture. This is another problem with ideology, it gives you tunnel vision, so you can't see the big picture.
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The deep failing is people are trying to work out, how to maintain business as usual, based on various ideologies, and make it compatible with natural systems, which don't conform to this mistaken language logic.
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There is a reason indigenous cultures protect 80% of the Earth's biodiversity, and that is because they never learned this very bad way of seeing the world, in terms of ideas and ideologies.

17/nhm.ac.uk/discover/indig…

No one has to explain to indigenous cultures, how to live sustainably, to live within their ecological means, because they have always intuitively understood this, as once did all human beings. Only ideologies, led people to lose their way, and their sight of the big picture.
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All explaining ideologies are a set of mental blinkers, which mean that people who adhere to them, can never see outside them. You only have to see how recognized cults, can capture even the most intelligent people, and they do it via ideologies.
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This is the "ideological paradox", where no one can see outside that ideological straight jacket, without creating another ideology, which has the same inherent problems, as the ideology, they tried to get out of.
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Yet, as I say, there is a counter-intuitive way out of it. That is to understand, that the map is never the territory, the idea is never reality, and therefore, ideology, no matter how rigorous, is never an all explaining plan or view of the world, but a closed loop.
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