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Politics and Self-Criticism
Aug. 8th, 2020 09:33 amPersonal interactions can be incredibly complex but are still easier for people to make sense of than the structure of an entire society. At the smaller scale of our personal lives, it's easier comprehend the consequences of an action in a tangible way. Whereas I feel like that's much less realistic for large-scale things. So what happens with those things, I think, is people absorb a lot of ideas that sound right to them and mesh with their personality, but when applying ideas to an entire society, they have to somehow work for a lot of very different people, many who will be very different from us, some who we would never want to personally associate with. And that's where it all breaks down.
And I often wonder if there's any set of beliefs that can actually do that in a reasonably satisfactory way. It seems to me that no ideology comes without its cost, though I often wonder if certain ideas are really as inextricable as people seem to make them out to be, or whether there isn't some way to actually combine the best of many different political philosophies to someday create a world that is truly and in all respects better than what has come before. I think a lot of suffering is the result of people not acknowledging that implementation doesn't always deliver on intent. And I don't think the solution to that is to come up with some new 'correct' ideology so much as being able to balance our understanding of the limitations of others with the limitations of ourselves. I think that any political ideology can become destructive if it becomes accepted as unquestionable dogma rather than a tool we must always seek to better understand the applications of, and if its very human limitations are not acknowledged.
I don't have anything super-insightful to offer here, just my feelings of uncertainty with regards to how to solve large scale problems. Even though I have very definite thoughts on these matters, and I think its necessary to act on my limited information, I also think it's important to always be trying to understand the world better, and to be willing to discard those ideas that clearly will not work out as I intended. But the issue of self-criticism is itself an area of many uncertainties for me. On the one hand, no one knows the best way to scrutinize ones ideas than themselves, but on the other, it seems such a critic will always be strongly biased in certain directions.
And I often wonder if there's any set of beliefs that can actually do that in a reasonably satisfactory way. It seems to me that no ideology comes without its cost, though I often wonder if certain ideas are really as inextricable as people seem to make them out to be, or whether there isn't some way to actually combine the best of many different political philosophies to someday create a world that is truly and in all respects better than what has come before. I think a lot of suffering is the result of people not acknowledging that implementation doesn't always deliver on intent. And I don't think the solution to that is to come up with some new 'correct' ideology so much as being able to balance our understanding of the limitations of others with the limitations of ourselves. I think that any political ideology can become destructive if it becomes accepted as unquestionable dogma rather than a tool we must always seek to better understand the applications of, and if its very human limitations are not acknowledged.
I don't have anything super-insightful to offer here, just my feelings of uncertainty with regards to how to solve large scale problems. Even though I have very definite thoughts on these matters, and I think its necessary to act on my limited information, I also think it's important to always be trying to understand the world better, and to be willing to discard those ideas that clearly will not work out as I intended. But the issue of self-criticism is itself an area of many uncertainties for me. On the one hand, no one knows the best way to scrutinize ones ideas than themselves, but on the other, it seems such a critic will always be strongly biased in certain directions.
