Thinking of ideology as the heat source driving cultural entropy
Obviously, the second law of culturodynamics predicts this
Note: the subheading above was kind of an irresistible joke. Entropy is what happens when things heat up and then come apart in a closed system, according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Get it?
Anyway, the thesis is this: ideologies are bad and give rise to clashes. These clashes are the cultural equivalent of the constantly warming closed system which the second law of thermodynamics predicts will always lead to disintegration - aka entropy.
No. The thesis gets us no further toward having nice things again. I just like it enough to share as another frame for viewing the times.
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Wishing to improve things is obviously a reasonable desire and so ideologies that revolve around 'progress' must be reasonable too, right?
My intuition remains that ideologies are typically more damaging than 'good' in any meaningful sense and I spend a lot of time thinking about why.
Once you care to notice this, viable reasons quickly mount.
One is that they tend to be reality-warping. In that they describe as reality that which they wish reality to be rather than how things are. Current gender ideology is a fascinating example of this warping in real time.
And they are exclusive of other perspectives, rather than unifying for people.
They are team sports, with no referee, and history is littered with ideologically-motivated mass killing. Until recently I hadn't appreciated that religion's historical legacy of 47 million deliberately organised deaths is easily beaten by communism's 67 million.
The coming apart of common humanity when a closed system gets hotter. Cultural - or anthropological - entropy.
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What you inevitably get with more ideology is polarisation, at individual and group level. I'm yet to see an argument that polarisation is good, so if ideology causes polarisation, ideology is the disease of which polarisation is the symptom.
What ideology seems to do is to instrumentalise some features of ourselves that most people are either unequipped to recognise, or merely incurious about. How many of us ever really ask why do I care about this situation and not that situation, where both situations involve people (or other things) being distressed or intolerably damaged.
Instead, we just leap to the assumption that our ideological assumptions are the correct ones. More ideology is therefore required and it will all be fine. And when everyone thinks in this way, they inevitably push apart rather than huddle together in an effort to fix things that we might all agree need fixing.
On an individual level I'm confident that left/liberals and right/conservatives often want the same outcomes, in the end. But ideology creates a rules-based and ultimately stifling environment for each, with no real room for manoeuvre.
In this way, ideological clashes are the closed systems in which the second law of thermodynamics states that the hotter it gets, the more everything inevitably comes apart.
(For an illustration of the stifling and exclusionary environment created by ideology, this account of Wokeish debating tactics is entertaining and dispiriting - The National Debate Tournament as a Case Study of College Woke Debate Insanity)
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Almost no one argues that everything is great, just the way it is. There's always a way to make things better, like fewer hungry people, less disease, more wealth or steady-state spiritual wellbeing.
Exactly which things to improve will always be debatable and dependent on your personal intuitions. But how do those intuitions work?
For the sake of argument, let's accept Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory as a reasonable basis for understanding how we identify our priorities.
A simplistic precis.
We all have baked-in moral intuitions. They weren't arrived at by thinking. They just are how we'll tend to feel about things. They have long flowed from our biological history as extremely advanced social apes.
Care/harm: disliking and wishing to end the suffering of others, not just ourselves. A typically left/liberal driver.
Fairness/cheating: we all have an intuition about who deserves what and how much they deserve it. Left/liberals and right/conservative brains will often have different ideas on the detail, but we share the basic intuition that there is such a thing as 'fairness' and 'cheating'.
Loyalty/betrayal: Tribal feelings, typically oriented toward supporting the in-group over the 'other' group.
Authority/subversion: how we relate to hierarchy and acceptance of being led.
Sanctity/degradation: a personal favourite illustration of this is how a liberal brain processes the idea of someone buying a chicken from the supermarket and having sex with it as completely fine. Whereas a conservative brain tends to be more readily disgusted by such things.
Liberty/oppression: kind of an adjunct to how you feel about being under authority (it's a bolt-on to the original Foundations theory and seems necessary in helping to understand responses to the Covid-19 pandemic).
Before reading The Righteous Mind (where Moral Foundations theory was first outlined) I was among the countless people who think it's possible to be 'right' about your moral intuitions. Consequently I was also among the countless people who refuse to recognise that different moral intuitions are even valid.
I was a partisan.
There was comfort there. I enjoyed feeling superior to conservatives and would snarkily post tweets about how they were wired for primitive emotions like fear, whereas liberals like me were open and more chilled about people doing whatever they wish (within the law) thereby making us more advanced beings.
This was when I naively thought that 'progress' was interchangeable, as a concept, with improvement.
It seems quaint now, to think in terms of superiority and goodness, just because I happened to be wired differently from somebody else.
But this seems to be a rare personal vibe shift. Almost no one else I know has changed their perspective on anything to take account of the possibility that people with different ideas are not flat out wrong or even bad, in some way.
The best we ever seem to manage is to acknowledge that we too are often stubborn about changing our own minds when we're annoyed about people who won't be persuaded to accept the world as we see it.
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None of this might have mattered much had it not been for the internet presenting most of us with the worst and most stupid expressions of these conflicting intuitions. Apart from almost punching a casual friend's face, when I was 19 or 20, for his slavish repetition of an objective lie told by our then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, I’ve long mostly lived in a bubble of like minded left-leaning liberals.
Even as late as the 2010s, I was oblivious to how half of my fellow citizens (in Britain at the time) were seeing the world until social media revealed it in the run-up to the Brexit referendum.
But it was remembering this that planted the seed of this minor theory about ideology and entropy.
The signs have been everywhere.
I junked a hitherto solid friendship with someone who was enthusiastic about Brexit. Deleted him entirely. He was dead to me. His passion was such that he wouldn't stay out of my LinkedIn mentions on the subject of international trade, of which he had mysteriously amassed a huge amount of 'expertise'.
This is entropy. In its cultural form.
It's the coming apart of things the 'hotter' the conditions in a closed system.
The reader may have assumed that a closed system here might be an ideology. The inevitable allusion being to ideologically-motivated closed minds.
But what I'm proposing is that the closed system is the clash between ideologies.
In the case above, the closed system was created by an unutterably stupid yes/no answer being demanded of the British people on something few of us had ever really thought much about. The heat source was our differing intuitions.
Out of curiosity I requested that ChatGPT explore this notion of ideology as cultural entropy and the result isn't bad.
Effectively, it seems to me that the stronger your opinions, the less tolerant you are of dissent. And the less tolerant you are, the less connected you are from others. Because we need to belong somewhere we attach ever more strongly to our own group. The only possible outcome is then warring camps. Just your standard issue polarisation.
It's a closed system, with ideology as the heat driving disintegration. Even within the camps themselves. There is no unified left and there is no unified right. This too is cultural entropy.
Everyone - on whichever side - feels like they’re losing. Because they are.
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It seems impossible to fix. We can imagine everyone having a kum ba ya moment and suddenly starting to converse in good faith, but I can’t imagine what might spark that. Things have come too far apart to reassemble now. The best we can do is to recognise it. And be less a part of it.
Rarely Certain is also subject to this form of entropy.
I lose paying subscribers at approximately the same rate as I gain them. Figuring out a pattern to this was easy.
People stump up cash for what they love. What they love is what they already think. So I do especially well when I write caustic verbiage on the grotesque proto-religion of Wokeism and then, when I say critical things about the right, subscribers melt away. Subscriber churn is - at least on the margins - in direct proportion to the stroking of readers' priors.
But I'd rather make a pittance doing this than to contribute to entropy by submitting to audience capture.
However, it's complicated and often the answer to 'where should I find my information' just feeds the entropy process.
For example, you'll often see an argument that because corporate and legacy media are flawed by ideological bias (which is obviously true) that it is a good thing that we can now curate the most comfortable information sources to uniquely suit our individual selves.
When Tara Henley interviewed veteran journalist Steve Krakaouer (transcript here) he said this:
"I think Substack is fantastic, mainly because Substack is hands-off about everything. You would think that this is a business model that should work. I mean, Substack is not putting their thumb on the scale, in any capacity. People are publishing things that are from the far left, progressive side, and from the far right, MAGA side — and everywhere in between. [As well as] things that are not ideological. That’s great. I think that we’ve seen this beyond Substack also, with YouTube and with social media, with podcasts. There is just so much more opportunity for independent media to accrue an audience, and to prove out that there is a connection that you can make with an audience that is deeper and feels much closer."
I was troubled because, as much as I love the mind-broadening writers I read here and elsewhere - or the commentators I watch on YouTube and listen to on podcasts - none of this is really bringing people together.
It's how an atomised society comforts itself, by consuming atomised media.
I'd prefer to see more discussion of entropy as the real problem. But 'polarisation' is catchier.
C'est la vie.
Find me on Substack Notes and say hello.
Or say hello to John Halpin’s dogs. They’re actually better than my Notes.
Back to the evils of ideology, to wrap up.
This - on
's site - is an elegant synopsis of how ideology not only makes you stupid, but also potentially bad.
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"I was troubled because, as much as I love the mind-broadening writers I read here and elsewhere - or the commentators I watch on YouTube and listen to on podcasts - none of this is really bringing people together.
It's how an atomised society comforts itself, by consuming atomised media."
I echo these sentiments. Once the beast of commerce can optimize for a larger number of smaller groups, it can more reliably make money by doing so. Ultimately, the Internet and various follow-on technologies, as implemented over the past 20 years, provide the powerful with ever greater ability to address a greater number of targets with further optimized messages. Rationalization.