Health Update and Interview
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On the Distinction between Ideology and Belief
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The following is taken from a draft of Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.
Belief systems and ideologies both depend on the ability to ignore.
The ability to ignore is necessary, given the incomprehensible complexity of the world. If something has proven itself irrelevant, through repetition, then it can be justly ignored. Relevance is presumed, at least initially. That is why new things (new skills, new situations) are overwhelming. Irrelevance is learned. What is irrelevant is what does not have to be taken into account during a certain time, in a certain place, and with regards to a particular starting and end point. That irrelevance is learned.
The consequence of such learning is simplification. A simplification can thus be good enough. It’s a toolbox whose purpose is functional interaction with the world, rather than the illusion of complete knowledge, or the garnering of an unfair advantage in a game of power.
A belief system is merely trying to simplify, while retaining pragmatic utility. A belief system can therefore be partial, but still be honest. It has a purpose, which it is trying to fulfill, and the simplifications it produces are directed honestly toward that fulfillment. A belief system might therefore be considered something akin to an unbiased compression algorithm: it is trying to represent a more complex reality by sampling equally across the entire domain of that reality.
An ideology, on the other hand, is trying to simplify for reasons other than tool-like accuracy in relationship to stated goals. An ideology therefore throws away certain information, invisibly, for unstated but motivated reasons.
The emergence of error—the emergence of anomaly—further tests the distinction between a belief system and an ideology. The ideologue, who is not interested in solving the problem, is motivated to destroy the anomalous. For the true solver of a problem, the emergence of an anomaly is a problem to be attended to, decomposed, analyzed, and solved, so that the function of the hierarchical machine can be restored. For an honest person, that’s the true meaning that can be derived by genuine commitment to an organization or a goal. Can we make this work? Can we make it work faster, cheaper, better? Can we serve more people? Can we, in a word, improve—and continually?
That’s not the striving for power, but the striving for a better world. And it is certainly the case that the functional status of the amazing infrastructure that surrounds us is absolutely dependent on those who are not striving for power but are striving for a better world.
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Podcast Re-release: Jacob's Ladder (season 3, episode 12)
- "Jacob is a morally ambivalent character—especially at the beginning of the story. He isn’t the sort of person that you would pick out—especially if you were a hack writer—as the hero of the story. He does a lot of things that are pretty reprehensible, and it takes him an awful lot of time to learn better. And yet, he’s the person who’s put forward as the father of the 12 tribes of Israel. It’s from this flawed person that the people emerges whose story, you might say, constitutes the fundamental underpinning of our culture. So you might think of that as a relief, too, because you’re no knight in shining armour, with a pure moral past." Listen to the current release or join the discussion.
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