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TM
Phoenix
Joined: Feb 04, 2012
Posts: 2122
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 Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2012 2:20 pm Post subject: Ideology, belief and the subjective mind. |
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In a bit of a meta turn, I'd like to stop discussing ideologies and beliefs for a bit and focus a little on the high degree of subjectiveness that tends to go into every ideology or belief discussed here.
I said it in an earlier thread that discussing an ideology or a belief is pointless so long as people are free to subjectively define the tenets of such an ideology and then remove the actual "in practice" aspect of the discussion. Ideologies, religions and whatnot all have 2 major sides, the theoretical side and the practical side.
Theory and Practice
Lets say ideology X in theory promotes Y, but in practice ends up promoting Z, in this case a person must be able to criticize the practice AND the theory that leads to that practice. There are usually "loopholes" in the theory that allows for the practical consequences or in some cases its stated outright that in order for X theory to work, Z contrary practice must precede it.
On the other hand, there are sometimes atrocious parts to the theory, but the practice is relatively benign on a cost-benefit analysis level. One can also not separate theory from practice and say that "theory X has nothing to do with event Y" when clear causality can be argued. Furthermore, if causality cannot be argued, one cannot argue as if it can be.
As an example, one cannot say that Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or North Korea are/were non-religious and one cannot argue that The Red Khmer's bloodbath in Cambodia was a result of Atheism, because those positions cannot be factually or logically argued for.
The Subjective bias.
With the subjective bias, I mean the person who comes into a thread and replies with "I am X and I don't believe that Y and Z are correct, therefore they should not be a part of ideology X" this is a huge problem in most discussions, because ideologies and words have definitions and changing them to suit a person's point of view perverts the ideology.
It's kind of how many people view themselves as Christian, despite not following the Christian doctrine, never going to church and not having seen a Bible since their confirmation.
Every ideology these days is pick and choose, and that makes discussing ideologies pointless because every person has their own subjective version of the ideology, in this case we are not discussing an ideology, we are discussing the personal beliefs of an individual, which derails the discussion.
Furthermore, if an individual identifies with an ideology, and thus elect to label themselves X-ist, but have a perverted subjective version of the ideology meaning that they are not really X-ist but Z-ist or Y-ist, then that person needs to realize that A: they have labled themselves wrongly, and B: that their subjective version is not what is being discussed since their version only exists within their head. |
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CloudLayer
Deinonychus
Joined: Mar 28, 2012
Age: 26
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| Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2012 3:14 pm Post subject: |
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I'm not sure I followed that argument because of its abstractness.
In any case, I have a personal philosophy, as does everyone. as no two human beings on earth hold the exact same values and ideals and interpret these in the same way. Some of these values and ideals overlap with those of commonly-recognized group/movement labels, some don't. I make a strong effort not to generalize my personal values under the label of a group. However, since within any philosophical group every member has to a degree different stances and/or interpretations of stances, agreement among members is what CREATES the commonly-held definition of the group. If you see various people who call themselves Christians disagreeing on whether tolerance of people of all sexual orientations, there is no one authority which can say "You are not a Christian, because a Christian is this" - not even some body of traditional high esteem like the pope - because in the end they are all just promoting their unique definition of adherence to what they believe is Christianity.
In the end a group label is there for ease of discussion of terms because of its widerspread but still always imperfect recognizance as endorsing certain (basic) tenets. It makes it easier to discuss things if more people agree on the definition. But for a movement to have any complexity at all, rather than just be a dictionary definition, it necessarily cannot be limited to a basic term that everyone in the movement can agree on, because ideals ARE necessaryily different from practice, being as the world is imperfect (in both the moral sense and the sense of its unpredictability and randomness).
Therefore: you can expect, when you ask individual members of a given group to explain in depth about the values and beliefs of a group, to get different answers. People don't share a common brain nor has the movement provided the function of a common brain by thinking out in advance every scenario that the movement's ideals could run into in practice, and giving all "official members" a memo on how to speak about it. This would be against individual thought anyway. If asked for a basic definition, you will get much closer to a dictionary definition, based on the main ideal(s) of the group which you could always look up yourself if interested. |
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TM
Phoenix
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| Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2012 3:33 pm Post subject: |
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My argument centered on something like, if I call myself a communist, it has to be assumed that I accept the values of communism as my own, not that I create my own values and call them communism. Then once I enter a discussion and someone critiques communism, that I substitute what is normally accepted as the values of communism then declare the critique invalid.
Not sure if that made it more clear. |
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CloudLayer
Deinonychus
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| Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2012 4:39 pm Post subject: |
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| Yes, that's what I thought you meant. The core values of a movement are necessarily ideals, however. There start to be different factions when you get into the applications of these ideals to various real-life situations. It is possible and usual for there to be different factions within a movement (inevitable in a movement of any significant size). I don't see anyone taking their unique personal values and ascribing them as the core values of anything in the feminism discussion, if that is the earlier thread you're referring to. |
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TM
Phoenix
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| Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2012 4:47 pm Post subject: |
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| CloudLayer wrote: | | Yes, that's what I thought you meant. The core values of a movement are necessarily ideals, however. There start to be different factions when you get into the applications of these ideals to various real-life situations. It is possible and usual for there to be different factions within a movement (inevitable in a movement of any significant size). I don't see anyone taking their unique personal values and ascribing them as the core values of anything in the feminism discussion, if that is the earlier thread you're referring to. |
It was one of the threads where I've seen it happen, but which thread and which ideology is unimportant, as the point is that you cannot individualize the values of an ideology according to your own subjective bias and then use that as the new central values of the ideology. |
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CloudLayer
Deinonychus
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| Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2012 4:52 pm Post subject: |
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| But where in that thread was that happening. |
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Pyrite
Sealion
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Age: 27
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Location: Mid-Atlantic United States
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| Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2012 12:23 pm Post subject: |
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The problem with your critique of the division of theory and practice and subjectivity is that it uncritically accepts the claims of totalitarian leaders that their ideological purity is axiomatic and remains so even when their policies or ideas change.
Ideologies are intellectual traditions that contain many different points of view on theory and even more on practice. Numerous different kinds of mutually exclusive policies are often justifiable as consistent with an ideology. This is especially true before achieving power because the ability to enforce discipline is comparatively limited. That is why attempts by historians to define ideologies in the abstract (rather than in particular incarnations) generally avoid issues of practice and many if not most points of theory and focus on very minimal sets of conditions.
After taking power, in many cases certain intellectual trends are repressed in favor of dogmatic uniformity (although this is never complete, does not preclude major policy shifts, and can vary over time within any particular regime). In some respects concentration of power can actually facilitate ideological inconsistency by putting an individual above reproach by party purists.
Lenin or Stalin would say that the fact they came to dominate the Soviet system proved "objectively" that their version of communism were "correct" and had always been correct even in the periods when it was a fringe view among socialists because events later proved it to be in accordance with "History" (in the Hegelian sense). Because they deemed themselves incapable of ideological deviation they could radically change their positions and still remain "correct."
This is of course, preposterous, unless like them, you consider truth to be subjectively defined by the party as a mere reflection of power without objective reality. |
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TM
Phoenix
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| Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2012 3:31 pm Post subject: |
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| Pyrite wrote: |
This is of course, preposterous, unless like them, you consider truth to be subjectively defined by the party as a mere reflection of power without objective reality. |
I tend to view an ideology defined by its creators and subsequent influential thinkers that build on what the creator(s) made. In essence a person that creates something has the right to define it, for instance, you couldn't create individualist-communism or "misogynist-femism" because in doing so you've violated the basic tenets laid out by the creator of the ideology. |
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Pyrite
Sealion
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| Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2012 8:34 pm Post subject: |
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| TM wrote: | | Pyrite wrote: |
This is of course, preposterous, unless like them, you consider truth to be subjectively defined by the party as a mere reflection of power without objective reality. |
I tend to view an ideology defined by its creators and subsequent influential thinkers that build on what the creator(s) made. In essence a person that creates something has the right to define it, for instance, you couldn't create individualist-communism or "misogynist-femism" because in doing so you've violated the basic tenets laid out by the creator of the ideology. |
Setting aside the questionable assertion that an ideology of individualist communism is impossible (such a tradition does exist and did have substantial followings), the main problem is how you pick "subsequent influential thinkers" and what you consider to constitute "building on."
The difficulty is that your second point requires that where contradictory theories or proposed tactics vie for for prominence within the same tradition they cannot be equally plausible extensions of "the creator's" work, but rather one must be 100% correct and the other completely wrong (this is what a dogmatic communist would say but not something an intellectual historian would accept).
It also seems to assume that all elements of theory and practice have guidelines that can be found in the work of early thinkers, when often they do not (Marx for instance wrote little about society after the revolution he predicted). |
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hyperlexian
loves the man who typed too much and ran outta spa
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| Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2012 3:02 am Post subject: |
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originally i didn't call myself a feminist because i don't actually care all that much about movements and such. but i kept getting labelled as such on WrongPlanet. this has never happened in real life for some reason, even though i am prone to discuss similar issues.
on WrongPlanet there is a tendency to package and label each other and then fling the label as an insult. i don't want to post multi-paragraph disclaimers with every post on feminist subjects, so i took to calling myself a feminist on here for ease of communication. then members would get a general idea of where i am coming from. i was called a feminist on here for over a year before i used the label myself.
if you don't think the labels are appropriate, by all means break the tradition and stop giving any labels to other members, and discourage others from doing so as well. i don't care either way - i am not attached to things like that.
but at the end of the day, there isn't a checklist of items that all supporters of _X_ philosophy must hold. movements by their very nature evolve and change (as do political philosophies and religions). we aren't living in Plato's land of forms, where it is possible to hold up a person to a comparison of an ideal Christian or feminist or whatever. this is the real world where things are flexible.
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NeantHumain
Phoenix
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| Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2012 11:39 pm Post subject: |
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| Idealogies, memeplexes, or theories are intellectual abstractions rather than material reality. Many scientific theories attempt to act as a model of reality. The kind of political and sociological idealogies and memeplexes you're talking about, though, are prescriptive rather than descriptive: They desire to change the world. In this, a political idealogy can fail because it is logically impossible or just impracticable. For these prescriptive idealogies like Marxism or Christianity, its advocates and practitioners often diverge from theory; politicians in particular work with the practical over the ideal. |
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sage_gerard
Snowy Owl
Joined: Apr 21, 2012
Age: 22
Posts: 149
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| Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2012 10:44 am Post subject: Re: Ideology, belief and the subjective mind. |
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| TM wrote: | | Lets say ideology X in theory promotes Y, but in practice ends up promoting Z, in this case a person must be able to criticize the practice AND the theory that leads to that practice. |
Are you saying that application leading to Z means Y is impossible under the ideals of X? St. Augustine urged others not to judge a belief by its abuses.
We could try to practice X so that Y can be actually realized until it is objectively proven it only capable of producing ~Y. Subjectivity allows for exploration until dead ends are found through rigorous experimentation, deduction and careful induction.
| Quote: | | With the subjective bias, I mean the person who comes into a thread and replies with "I am X and I don't believe that Y and Z are correct, therefore they should not be a part of ideology X" this is a huge problem in most discussions, because ideologies and words have definitions and changing them to suit a person's point of view perverts the ideology. |
It is annoying is that some do not see that their relationship to X is derivative, but I would be hard pressed to think of different names for an ideology every time a new perspective pops up. If I were to accept a large ideology like P, but only reject some premises, leaving the rest largely indistinguishable from P, what do I call it without making posts irritating to read or write?
If one did not declare oneself X-ist at all, they are left to spend time explaining himself for longer when he could just say something like: "I follow X for the most part, but with this bit thrown out because I want Y instead of Z".
| Quote: | | I tend to view an ideology defined by its creators and subsequent influential thinkers that build on what the creator(s) made. In essence a person that creates something has the right to define it, for instance, you couldn't create individualist-communism or "misogynist-femism" because in doing so you've violated the basic tenets laid out by the creator of the ideology. |
Why would someone have any authority to define an ideology when they are just as vulnerable to the problem you've mentioned?
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TM
Phoenix
Joined: Feb 04, 2012
Posts: 2122
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| Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2012 12:16 pm Post subject: Re: Ideology, belief and the subjective mind. |
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| sage_gerard wrote: | | TM wrote: | | Lets say ideology X in theory promotes Y, but in practice ends up promoting Z, in this case a person must be able to criticize the practice AND the theory that leads to that practice. |
Are you saying that application leading to Z means Y is impossible under the ideals of X? St. Augustine urged others not to judge a belief by its abuses.
We could try to practice X so that Y can be actually realized until it is objectively proven it only capable of producing ~Y. Subjectivity allows for exploration until dead ends are found through rigorous experimentation, deduction and careful induction. |
No, I'm saying that instead of X leading to Y, the person in question revises X so that it leads to Z.
[quote="sage_gerard"] | TM wrote: |
| Quote: | | With the subjective bias, I mean the person who comes into a thread and replies with "I am X and I don't believe that Y and Z are correct, therefore they should not be a part of ideology X" this is a huge problem in most discussions, because ideologies and words have definitions and changing them to suit a person's point of view perverts the ideology. |
It is annoying is that some do not see that their relationship to X is derivative, but I would be hard pressed to think of different names for an ideology every time a new perspective pops up. If I were to accept a large ideology like P, but only reject some premises, leaving the rest largely indistinguishable from P, what do I call it without making posts irritating to read or write?
If one did not declare oneself X-ist at all, they are left to spend time explaining himself for longer when he could just say something like: "I follow X for the most part, but with this bit thrown out because I want Y instead of Z".
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It depends on which premises are rejected and how central they are to the ideology in question. In your example its fine to call yourself P, or a version of P. However, if you reject the central premises then its a problem.
[quote="sage_gerard"] | TM wrote: |
| Quote: | | I tend to view an ideology defined by its creators and subsequent influential thinkers that build on what the creator(s) made. In essence a person that creates something has the right to define it, for instance, you couldn't create individualist-communism or "misogynist-femism" because in doing so you've violated the basic tenets laid out by the creator of the ideology. |
Why would someone have any authority to define an ideology when they are just as vulnerable to the problem you've mentioned? |
Because they are the best qualified to do so and I tend to support people have definition rights of their own creations,. If the creator is dead, thinkers recognized by a majority of Xists are the best qualified to make alterations. |
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sage_gerard
Snowy Owl
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Age: 22
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| Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2012 8:12 pm Post subject: Re: Ideology, belief and the subjective mind. |
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| TM wrote: | | Because they are the best qualified to do so and I tend to support people have definition rights of their own creations,. If the creator is dead, thinkers recognized by a majority of Xists are the best qualified to make alterations. |
If this is not what you are trying to convey, please correct me: People are free to define a new ideology X and declare themselves an authority on it, assuming X is noticeably distinct from Y. How true the two ideologies are is not on trial here. Qualified Xists must reflect on X as its pioneers did and derive new knowledge consistent with X. Deviation from X in theory or practice can be detected, and anyone who thinks or behaves as a Yist has no business calling themselves Xist.
To avoid future confusion with the politically-oriented, I would leave people out of the discussion and summarize the whole argument as "be consistent". You are speaking in defense of consistency by saying that contradictions are false in the scope of an ideology.
Well... Yeah! 
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Declension
Phoenix
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| Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2012 8:28 pm Post subject: |
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There is a useful trick which can help when a discussion becomes too filled with labels. You simply request that everyone in the discussion "taboos" the labels in question.
This is very helpful in discussions about "free will", for example. If you are not allowed to say the offending phrase "free will", very often you realise that there isn't actually much that people disagree about.
Similarly, if we were to forbid people from using words like "Marxist" or "communist", people would instead be forced to say explicit things like "I believe that the current system will collapse if not substantially modified", or "I believe that many things are more important than freedom from direct aggression". |
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