Abandon Ideology (A lesson in Politics and Psychology)

Rule 6: Abandon Ideology

Chapter 6 from the book by Jordan B. Peterson: Beyond Order. 12 More Rules for Life (2021)



After I published my last book, my wife, Tammy, and I embarked on a lengthy speaking tour throughout the English-speaking world and a good part of Europe, particularly in the north. Most of the theaters I spoke at were old and beautiful, and it was a delight to be in buildings with such rich architectural and cultural histories, where so many of the bands we loved had played, and where other performing artists had had their great moments. We booked 160 theaters—generally with a capacity of about 2,500 to 3,000 people (although there were smaller venues in Europe, and larger in Australia). I was—and am—struck to the core by the fact that there was such an extensive audience for my lectures—and that we found that audience seemingly everywhere. The same surprise extends to my YouTube and podcast appearances—on my own channels, in interviews on others, and in the innumerable clips that people have voluntarily cut from my longer talks and discussions with journalists. These have been watched or listened to hundreds of millions of times. And finally, there is the aforementioned book, which will have sold something like four million copies in English by the time the present volume is published, and which will be translated into fifty additional languages, assuming matters continue as they are now. It is not at all easy to know what to think about finding myself with an audience like that.

What is going on? Any sensible person would be taken aback—to put it mildly—by all of this. It seems that my work must be addressing something that is missing in many people’s lives. Now, as I mentioned previously, I am relying for much of my content on the ideas of great psychologists and other thinkers, and that should count for something. But I have also been continually considering what else more specific (if anything) might be attracting people’s attention, and have been relying on two sources of information to try to determine exactly that. The first is the response I get directly from individuals themselves, when I meet them in the immediate aftermath of one of my lectures or when they stop me on the street, in airports, cafés, or other public places.

In one midwestern American city (I think it might have been Louisville), a young man met me after my lecture and said, “Quick story. Two years ago, I was released from prison. Homeless. Broke.

I started listening to your lectures. Now I have a full-time job, and I own my apartment, and my wife and I just had our first child—a daughter. Thank you.” And the “thank you” was accompanied with direct eye contact and a firm handshake, and the story was told in the voice of conviction. And people tell me very similar stories on the street, often in tears, although the one I just related was perhaps a bit more extreme than the average tale. They share very private good news (the kind you share only with people to whom you can safely tell such things). And I feel greatly privileged to be one of those people, although it is emotionally demanding to be the recipient of continual personal revelations, regardless (or maybe even because) of the fact that they are so positive. I find it heart-wrenching to see how little encouragement and guidance so many people have received, and how much good can emerge when just a little more is provided. “I knew you could do it” is a good start, and goes a long way toward ameliorating some of the unnecessary pain in the world.

So, that is one form of story that I hear, continually, in many variants. When we meet, one on one, people also tell me that they enjoy my lectures and what I have written because what I say and write provides them with the words they need to express things they already know, but are unable to articulate. It is helpful for everyone to be able to represent explicitly what they already implicitly understand. I am frequently plagued with doubts about the role that I am playing, so the fact that people find my words exist in accordance with their deep but heretofore unrealized or unexpressed beliefs is reassuring, helping me maintain faith in what I have learned and thought about and have now shared so publicly. Helping people bridge the gap between what they profoundly intuit but cannot articulate seems to be a reasonable and valuable function for a public intellectual. And then there is the final piece of information bearing on whatever it is that I am accomplishing. I have garnered it as a direct consequence of the live lectures that I have had so many opportunities to deliver. It is a privilege and a gift to be able to talk repeatedly to large groups of people. It provides a real-time opportunity to judge the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. It also allows me to formulate and immediately test new ideas for their communicability and their ability to grip attention and, thereby, to judge their quality—at least in part. This occurs during the talk when I attend to how the audience responds.

In 12 Rules for Life, Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you do not, I suggest that when speaking to a large group you should nonetheless always be attending to specific individuals—the crowd is somewhat of an illusion. However, you can augment your individual- focused visual attention by simultaneously listening to the entire group, so that you hear them rustling around, laughing, coughing, or whatever they happen to be doing, while you concentrate on perceiving specific individuals. What you want to see from the person you are facing is rapt attention. What you want to hear from the crowd is dead silence. You want to hear nothing. Achieving that means your listeners are not distracted by everything they could be thinking about while in attendance. If you are an audience member at a performance, and you are not completely enthralled by the content, you become preoccupied by some slight physical discomforts, and shift from place to place. You become aware of your own thoughts. You begin to think about what you need to do tomorrow. You whisper something to the person beside you. That all adds up to discontent in the audience, and audible noise.

But if you, as speaker, are positioned properly on stage, physically and spiritually, then everybody’s attention will be focused with laser-like intensity on whatever you are saying, and no one will make a sound. In this manner, you can tell what ideas have power.

While watching and listening in the way I just described to all the gatherings I have spoken to, I became increasingly aware that the mention of one topic in particular brought every audience (and I mean that without exception) to a dead-quiet halt: responsibility—the very topic we made central in this book in Rule IV: Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. That response was fascinating—and not at all predictable. Responsibility is not an easy sell. Parents have been striving forever to make their kids responsible. Society attempts the same thing, with its educational institutions, apprenticeships, volunteer organizations, and clubs. You might even consider the inculcation of responsibility the fundamental purpose of society. But something has gone wrong. We have committed an error, or a series of errors. We have spent too much time, for example (much of the last fifty years), clamoring about rights, and we are no longer asking enough of the young people we are socializing. We have been telling them for decades to demand what they are owed by society.
We have been implying that the important meanings of their lives will be given to them because of such demands, when we should have been doing the opposite: letting them know that the meaning that sustains life in all its tragedy and disappointment is to be found in shouldering a noble burden.
Because we have not been doing this, they have grown up looking in the wrong places. And this has left them vulnerable: vulnerable to easy answers and susceptible to the deadening force of resentment.
What about the unfolding of history has left us in this position? How has this vulnerability, this susceptibility, come about? 

Perhaps he is only sleeping.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously announced “God is dead.” This utterance has become so famous that you can even see it scribbled on the walls of public bathrooms, where it often takes the following form: “God is dead” —Nietzsche. “Nietzsche is dead” —God. 
Nietzsche did not make this claim in a narcissistic or triumphant manner.
The great thinker’s opinion stemmed from his fear that all the Judeo-Christian values serving as the foundation of Western civilization had been made dangerously subject to casual rational criticism, and that the most important axiom upon which they were predicated—the existence of a transcendent, all-powerful deity—had been fatally challenged. Nietzsche concluded from this that everything would soon fall apart, in a manner catastrophic both psychologically and socially.

It does not require a particularly careful reader to note that Nietzsche described God, in The Gay Science, as the “holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned,” and modern human beings as “the murderers of all murderers.” These are not the sorts of descriptions you might expect from a triumphant rationalist celebrating the demise of superstition. It was instead a statement of absolute despair. In his other works, particularly in The Will to Power, Nietzsche describes what would occur in the next century and beyond because of this murderous act. He prophesied (and that is the correct word for it) that two major consequences would arise—apparent opposites, although each linked inextricably and causally together—and both associated with the death of traditional ritual, story, and belief.
As the purpose of human life became uncertain outside the purposeful structure of monotheistic thought and the meaningful world it proposed, we would experience an existentially devastating rise in nihilism, Nietzsche believed. Alternatively, he suggested, people would turn to identification with rigid, totalitarian ideology: the substitute of human ideas for the transcendent Father of All Creation.

The doubt that undermines and the certainty that crushes: Nietzsche’s prognostication for the two alternatives that would arise in the aftermath of the death of God.

The incomparable Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky addressed the same question as Nietzsche—at about the same time—in his masterwork The Possessed (alternatively known as Demons or The Devils). The protagonist in that novel, Nikolai Stavrogin, is wed to the same ideals that eventually birthed revolutionary communism, although he lives his fictional life decades before the full-fledged turmoil began in what became the Soviet Union. The appearance of these ideals was not a positive development, in Dostoevsky’s view. He could see that the adoption of a rigid, comprehensive utopian ideology, predicated on a few apparently self-evident axioms, presented a political and spiritual danger with the potential to far exceed in brutality all that had occurred in the religious, monarchical, or even pagan past. Dostoyevsky, like Nietzsche, foresaw that all of this was coming almost fifty years (!) before the Leninist Revolution in Russia. That incomprehensible level of prophetic capacity remains a stellar example of how the artist and his intuition brings to light the future far before others see it.
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky both foresaw that communism would appear dreadfully attractive—an apparently rational, coherent, and moral alternative to religion or nihilism—and that the consequences would be lethal. The former wrote, in his inimitably harsh, ironic, and brilliant manner, “In fact, I even wish a few experiments might be made to show that in socialistic society life denies itself, and itself cuts away its own roots. The earth is big enough and man is still unexhausted enough for a practical lesson of this sort and demonstratio ad absurdum—even if it were accomplished only by a vast expenditure of lives—to seem worthwhile to me.” The socialism Nietzsche referred to was not the relatively mild version later popular in Britain, Scandinavia, and Canada, with its sometimes genuine emphasis on the improvement of working-class life, but the full-blown collectivism of Russia, China, and a host of smaller countries. Whether we have truly learned the “practical lesson”—the demonstration of the absurdity of the doctrine—as a consequence of Nietzsche’s predicted “vast expenditure of lives” remains to be seen.
Nietzsche appears to have unquestioningly adopted the idea that the world was both objective and valueless in the manner posited by the emergent physical sciences. This left him with a single remaining escape from nihilism and totalitarianism: the emergence of the individual strong enough to create his own values, project them onto valueless reality, and then abide by them. He posited that a new kind of man—the Übermensch (the higher person or superman)—would be necessary in the aftermath of the death of God, so that society would not drift toward the opposing rocky shoals of despair and oversystematized political theorizing. Individuals who take this route, this alternative to nihilism and totalitarianism, must therefore produce their own cosmology of values.
However, the psychoanalysts Freud and Jung put paid to that notion, demonstrating that we are not sufficiently in possession of ourselves to create values by conscious choice. Furthermore, there is little evidence that any of us have the genius to create ourselves ex nihilo—from nothing—particularly given the extreme limitations of our experience, the biases of our perceptions, and the short span of our lives. We have a nature—or, too often, it has us—and only a fool would now dare to claim that we have sufficient mastery of ourselves to create, rather than discover, what we value. We have the capacity for spontaneous revelatory experience—artistic, inventive, and religious. We discover new things about ourselves constantly, to our delight—and also to our dismay, as we are so often overcome by our emotions and motivations. We contend with our nature. We negotiate with it. But it is not at all obvious that the individual will ever be capable of bringing the new values that Nietzsche so fervently longed for into being.
There are other problems with Nietzsche’s argument, as well. If each of us lives by our own created and projected values, what remains to unite us? This is a philosophical problem of central importance.
How could a society of Übermenschen possibly avoid being at constant odds with one another, unless there was something comparable about their created values? Finally, it is by no means obvious that any such supermen have ever come into existence. Instead, over the last century and a half, with the modern crisis of meaning and the rise of totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Communist China, we appear to have found ourselves in exactly the nihilistic or ideologically possessed state that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky feared, accompanied by precisely the catastrophic sociological and psychological consequences they foretold.
It is also by no means self-evident that value, subjective though it appears to be, is not an integral part of reality, despite the undeniable utility of the scientific method. The central scientific axiom left to us by the Enlightenment—that reality is the exclusive domain of the objective—poses a fatal challenge to the reality of religious experience, if the latter experience is fundamentally subjective (and it appears to be exactly that). But there is something complicating the situation that seems to lie between the subjective and the objective: What if there are experiences that typically manifest themselves to one person at a time (as seems to be the case with much of revelation), but appear to form a meaningful pattern when considered collectively? That indicates something is occurring that is not merely subjective, even though it cannot be easily pinned down with the existing methods of science.
It could be, instead, that the value of something is sufficiently idiosyncratic—sufficiently dependent on the particularities of time, place, and the individual experiencing that thing—that it cannot be fixed and replicated in the manner required for it to exist as a scientific object. This does not mean, however, that value is not real: It means only that it is so complex that it cannot yet and may never fit itself within the scientific worldview. The world is a very strange place, and there are times when the metaphorical or narrative description characteristic of culture and the material representation so integral to science appear to touch, when everything comes together—when life and art reflect each other equally.
The psyche—the soul—that produces or is the recipient of such experiences appears incontrovertibly real: the proof lying not least in our actions. We all axiomatically assume the reality of our individual existences and conscious experiences, and we extend the same courtesy to others (or else).
It is by no means unreasonable to suggest that such existence and experience has a deep underlying biological and physical structure. Those with a psychoanalytic bent certainly assume so, as do many who study biological psychology, particularly if they focus on motivation and emotion. That structure, accepted as a given by scientists and by the general population in equal measure, appears to manifest religious experience as part of its basic function—and that religious function has enough commonality across people to make us at least understand what “religious experience” means—particularly if we have had a taste of it at some point in life.

What does that imply? It might be that the true meaning of life is available for discovery, if it can be discovered at all, by each individual, alone—although in communication with others, past and present. It may well be, therefore, that the true meaning of life is not to be found in what is objective, but in what is subjective (but still universal). The existence of conscience, for example, provides some evidence for that, as does the fact that religious experiences can reliably be induced chemically, as well as through practices such as dancing, chanting, fasting, and meditating. Additionally, the fact that religious ideas are capable of uniting vast numbers of people under a single moral umbrella (although such ideas can divide across sects, as well) also indicates something universal calling from within. Why do we so easily assume that nothing about that is real, given its apparent commonality and necessity—given, as well, the near certainty that the capacity for valuing is an ancient evolved function, selected for by the very reality we are attempting to define and understand? We have seen the consequences of the totalitarian alternatives in which the collective is supposed to bear the burdens of life, lay out the proper pathway, and transform the terrible world into the promised utopia. The communists produced a worldview that was attractive to fair-minded people, as well as those who were envious and cruel. Perhaps communism may even have been a viable solution to the problems of the unequal distribution of wealth that characterized the industrial age, if all of the hypothetically oppressed were good people and all of the evil was to be found, as hypothesized, in their bourgeoisie overlords. Unfortunately for the communists, a substantial proportion of the oppressed were incapable, unconscientious, unintelligent, licentious, power mad, violent, resentful, and jealous, while a substantial proportion of the oppressors were educated, able, creative, intelligent, honest, and caring. When the frenzy of dekulakization swept through the newly established Soviet Union, it was vengeful and jealous murderers who were redistributing property, while it was competent and reliable farmers, for the most part, from whom it was violently taken. One unintended consequence of that “redistribution” of good fortune was the starvation of six million Ukrainians in the 1930s, in the midst of some of the most fertile land in the world.

The other major villains of the twentieth century, Germany’s National Socialists, were, of course, also powerful and dangerous ideologues. It has been suggested that Hitler’s acolytes were inspired by Nietzsche’s philosophy. This claim may hold some truth in a perverse manner, as they were certainly trying to create their own values, although not as the individuals whose development the philosopher promoted. It is more reasonable to say that Nietzsche identified the cultural and historical conditions that made the rise to influence of ideas akin to those promoted by the Nazis extremely likely. The Nazis were trying to create a post-Christian, postreligious perfect man, the ideal Aryan, and certainly formulated that ideal in a manner not in accordance with the dictates of either Judaism or Christianity.

Thus, the perfect Aryan could be and certainly was conceptualized by the Nazis as a “higher man.”
This does not mean that the Nazi ideal as postulated bore any resemblance to the Nietzschean ideal.
Quite the contrary: Nietzsche was a fervent admirer of individuality and would have considered the idea of the higher man as state creation both absurd and abhorrent.

The Fatal Attraction of the False Idol 

Consider those who have not gone so far as to adopt the discredited ideologies of the Marxist-Leninists and the Nazis, but who still maintain faith in the commonplace isms characterizing the modern world: conservatism, socialism, feminism (and all manner of ethnic-and-gender-study isms), postmodernism, and environmentalism, among others. They are all monotheists, practically speaking—or polytheistic worshippers of a very small number of gods. These gods are the axioms and foundational beliefs that must be accepted, a priori, rather than proven, before the belief system can be adopted, and when accepted and applied to the world allow the illusion to prevail that knowledge has been produced.
The process by which an ism system can be generated is simple in its initial stages but baroque enough in its application to mimic (and replace) actual productive theorizing. The ideologue begins by selecting a few abstractions in whose low-resolution representations hide large, undifferentiated chunks of the world. Some examples include “the economy,” “the nation,” “the environment,” “the patriarchy,”
“the people,” “the rich,” “the poor,” “the oppressed,” and “the oppressors.” The use of single terms implicitly hypersimplifies what are in fact extraordinarily diverse and complex phenomena (that masked complexity is part of the reason that the terms come to carry so much emotional weight). There are many reasons, for example, why people are poor. Lack of money is the obvious cause—but that hypothetical obviousness is part of the problem with ideology. Lack of education, broken families, crime-ridden neighborhoods, alcoholism, drug abuse, criminality and corruption (and the political and economic exploitation that accompanies it), mental illness, lack of a life plan (or even failure to realize that formulating such a plan is possible or necessary), low conscientiousness, unfortunate geographical locale, shift in the economic landscape and the consequent disappearance of entire fields of endeavor, the marked proclivity for those who are rich to get richer still and the poor to get poorer, low creativity/entrepreneurial interest, lack of encouragement—these are but a few of the manifold problems that generate poverty, and the solution to each (assuming that a solution exists) is by no means obviously the same. Nor are the villains hiding behind each putative and differentiable cause the same villains (assuming that there are even villains to be found).
All such problems require careful, particularized analysis, followed by the generation of multiple potential solutions, followed by the careful assessment of those solutions to ensure that they are having their desired effect. It is uncommon to see any serious social problem addressed so methodically.
It is also rare that the solutions generated, even by methodical process, produce the intended outcome. The great difficulty of assessing problems in sufficient detail to understand what is causing them, followed by the equally great difficulty of generating and testing particularized solutions, is sufficient to deter even the stouthearted, let us say, from daring to tackle a true plague of mankind.
Since the ideologue can place him or herself on the morally correct side of the equation without the genuine effort necessary to do so validly, it is much easier and more immediately gratifying to reduce the problem to something simple and accompany it with an evildoer, who can then be morally opposed.
After breaking the world into large, undifferentiated pieces, describing the problem(s) that characterize each division, and identifying the appropriate villains, the ism theorist then generates a small number of explanatory principles or forces (which may indeed contribute in some part to the understanding or existence of those abstracted entities). Then he or she grants to that small number primary causal power, while ignoring others of equal or greater importance. It is most effective to utilize a major motivational system or large-scale sociological fact or conjecture for such purposes. It is also 79good to select those explanatory principles for an unstated negative, resentful, and destructive reason, and then make discussion of the latter and the reason for their existence taboo for the ideologue and his or her followers (to say nothing of the critics). Next, the faux theorist spins a post-hoc theory about how every phenomenon, no matter how complex, can be considered a secondary consequence of the new, totalizing system. Finally, a school of thought emerges to propagate the methods of this algorithmic reduction (particularly when the thinker is hoping to attain dominance in the conceptual and the real worlds), and those who refuse to adopt the algorithm or who criticize its use are tacitly or explicitly demonized.
Incompetent and corrupt intellectuals thrive on such activity, such games. The first players of a given game of this sort are generally the brightest of the participants. They weave a story around their causal principle of choice, demonstrating how that hypothetically primary motivational force profoundly contributed to any given domain of human activity. Sometimes this is even helpful, as such activity may shed light on how a motivation heretofore taboo to discuss or consider might play a larger role in affecting human behavior and perception than was previously deemed acceptable (this is what happened, for example, with Freud, and his emphasis on sex). Their followers, desperate to join a potentially masterable new dominance hierarchy (the old one being cluttered by its current occupants), become enamored of that story. While doing so, being less bright than those they follow, they subtly shift “contributed to” or “affected” to “caused.” The originator(s), gratified by the emergence of followers, start to shift their story in that direction as well. Or they object, but it does not matter.
The cult has already begun.
This kind of theorizing is particularly attractive to people who are smart but lazy. Cynicism serves as an aid, too, as does arrogance. The new adherents will be taught that mastering such a game constitutes education, and will learn to criticize alternative theories, different methods, and increasingly, even the idea of fact itself. If an impenetrable vocabulary accompanies the theory, so much the better.
It will then take potential critics some valuable time even to learn to decode the arguments. And there is a conspiratorial aspect that rapidly comes to pervade the school where such “education” occurs, and where such activity is increasingly all that is permitted: Do not criticize the theory—and do not get singled out. Do not become unpopular. Even: Do not receive a bad grade, or a poor review, for expressing a taboo opinion (and even when this does not occur in practice, the fear that it might keeps many students and professors, or employees and employers, in check).
Freud, as we noted, attempted to reduce motivation to sexuality, to libido. The same can be done quite effectively by anyone sufficiently literate, intelligent, and verbally fluent. This is because “sexuality” (like any multifaceted single term) can be defined as tightly or as loosely as necessary by those who use it for comprehensively explanatory purposes. No matter how defined, sex is a crucially important biological phenomenon—key to complex life itself—and its influence may therefore be genuinely detected or plausibly invented in any important field of endeavor and then exaggerated (while other factors of significant import are diminished in importance). In this manner, the single explanatory principle can be expanded indefinitely, in keeping with the demands placed upon it.

Marx did the same thing when he described man in a fundamentally economic, class-based manner, and history as the eternal battleground of bourgeoisie and proletariat. Everything can be explained by running it through a Marxist algorithm. The wealthy are wealthy because they exploit the poor.
The poor are poor because they are exploited by the wealthy. All economic inequality is undesirable, unproductive, and a consequence of fundamental unfairness and corruption. There is, of course—as in the case of Freud—some value in Marx’s observations. Class is an important element of social hierarchies, and tends to maintain itself with a certain stability across time. Economic well-being, or the lack thereof, is of crucial significance. And the damnable fact of the Pareto distribution[42] —the tendency of those who have more to get more (which seems to apply in any economic system)—does mean that 80wealth accumulates in the hands of a minority of people. The people who make up that minority do change substantively, regardless of the aforementioned class stability, and that is a crucial point, but the fact that the comparatively rich are always a minority—and a small one, at that—seems dismally immutable.
Regardless of its hypothetical virtues, however, the implementation of Marxism was a disaster everywhere it was attempted—and that has motivated attempts by its unrepentant would-be present-day adherents to clothe its ideas in new garb and continue forward, as if nothing of significance has changed.
Thinkers powerfully influenced by Marx and overwhelmingly influential in much of the academy today (such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) modified the Marxist simplification essentially by replacing “economics” with “power”—as if power were the single motivating force behind all human behavior (as opposed, say, to competent authority, or reciprocity of attitude and action).

Ideological reduction of that form is the hallmark of the most dangerous of pseudo-intellectuals. Ideologues are the intellectual equivalent of fundamentalists, unyielding and rigid. Their self-righteousness and moral claim to social engineering is every bit as deep and dangerous. It might even be worse: ideologues lay claim to rationality itself. So, they try to justify their claims as logical and thoughtful.

At least the fundamentalists admit devotion to something they just believe arbitrarily. They are a lot more honest. Furthermore, fundamentalists are bound by a relationship with the transcendent.

What this means is that God, the center of their moral universe, remains outside and above complete understanding, according to the fundamentalist’s own creed. Right-wing Jews, Islamic hard-liners, and ultra-conservative Christians must admit, if pushed, that God is essentially mysterious. This concession provides at least some boundary for their claims, as individuals, to righteousness and power (as the genuine fundamentalist at least remains subordinate to Something he cannot claim to totally understand, let alone master). For the ideologue, however, nothing remains outside understanding or mastery. An ideological theory explains everything: all the past, all the present, and all the future. This means that an ideologue can consider him or herself in possession of the complete truth (something forbidden to the self-consistent fundamentalist). There is no claim more totalitarian and no situation in which the worst excesses of pride are more likely to manifest themselves (and not only pride, but then deceit, once the ideology has failed to explain the world or predict its future).
The moral of the story? Beware of intellectuals who make a monotheism out of their theories of motivation. Beware, in more technical terms, of blanket univariate (single variable) causes for diverse, complex problems. Of course, power plays a role in history, as does economics. But the same can be said of jealousy, love, hunger, sex, cooperation, revelation, anger, disgust, sadness, anxiety, religion, compassion, disease, technology, hatred, and chance—none of which can definitively be reduced to another. The attraction of doing so is, however, obvious: simplicity, ease, and the illusion of mastery (which can have exceptionally useful psychological and social consequences, particularly in the short term)—and, let us not forget, the frequent discovery of a villain, or set of villains, upon which the hidden motivations for the ideology can be vented.

Ressentiment 

Ressentiment—hostile resentment—occurs when individual failure or insufficient status is blamed both on the system within which that failure or lowly status occurs and then, most particularly, on the people who have achieved success and high status within that system. The former, the system, is deemed by fiat to be unjust. The successful are deemed exploitative and corrupt, as they can be logically read as undeserving beneficiaries, as well as the voluntary, conscious, self-serving, and immoral supporters, if the system is unjust. Once this causal chain of thought has been accepted, all attacks on the successful can be construed as morally justified attempts at establishing justice—rather than, say, manifestations of envy and covetousness that might have traditionally been defined as shameful.

There is another typical feature of ideological pursuit: the victims supported by ideologues are always innocent (and it is sometimes true that victims are innocent), and the perpetrators are always evil (evil perpetrators are also not in short supply). But the fact that there exist genuine victims and perpetrators provides no excuse to make low-resolution, blanket statements about the global locale of blameless victimization and evil perpetration—particularly of the type that does not take the presumed innocence of the accused firmly into account. No group guilt should be assumed —and certainly not of the multigenerational kind. It is a certain sign of the accuser’s evil intent, and a harbinger of social catastrophe. But the advantage is that the ideologue, at little practical costs, can construe him or herself both as nemesis of the oppressor and defender of the oppressed. Who needs the fine distinctions that determination of individual guilt or innocence demands when a prize such as that beckons? To take the path of ressentiment is to risk tremendous bitterness. This is in no small part a consequence of identifying the enemy without rather than within. If wealth is the problem at issue, for example, and the wealthy perceived as the reason for poverty and all the other problems of the world, then the wealthy become the enemy—indistinguishable, in some profound sense, from a degree of evil positively demonic in its psychological and social significance. If power is the problem, then those who have established any authority at all are the singular cause of the world’s suffering. If masculinity is the problem, then all males (or even the concept of male) must be attacked and vilified.33 Such division of the world into the devil without and the saint within justifies self-righteous hatred—necessitated by the morality of the ideological system itself. This is a terrible trap: Once the source of evil has been identified, it becomes the duty of the righteous to eradicate it. This is an invitation to both paranoia and persecution. A world where only you and people who think like you are good is also a world where you are surrounded by enemies bent on your destruction, who must be fought.

It is much safer morally to look to yourself for the errors of the world, at least to the degree to which someone honest and free of willful blindness might consider. You are likely to be much more clear minded about what is what and who is who and where blame lies once you contemplate the log in your own eye, rather than the speck in your brother’s. It is probable that your own imperfections are evident and plentiful, and could profitably be addressed, as step one in your Redeemer’s quest to improve the world. To take the world’s sins onto yourself—to assume responsibility for the fact that things have not been set right in your own life and elsewhere—is part of the messianic path: part of the imitation of the hero, in the most profound of senses. This is a psychological or spiritual rather than a sociological or political issue. Consider the characters fabricated by second-rate crafters of fiction: they are simply divided into those who are good and those who are evil. By contrast, sophisticated writers put the divide inside the characters they create, so that each person becomes the locus of the eternal struggle between light and darkness. It is much more psychologically appropriate (and much less dangerous socially) to assume that you are the enemy—that it is your weaknesses and insufficiencies that are damaging the world—than to assume saintlike goodness on the part of you and your party, and to pursue the enemy you will then be inclined to see everywhere.

It is impossible to fight patriarchy, reduce oppression, promote equality, transform capitalism, save the environment, eliminate competitiveness, reduce government, or to run every organization like a business. Such concepts are simply too low-resolution. The Monty Python comedy crew once offered satirical lessons for playing the flute: blow over one end and move your fingers up and down on the holes. True. But useless. The necessary detail is simply not there. Similarly, sophisticated large-scale processes and systems do not exist in a manner sufficiently real to render their comprehensive unitary transformation possible. The idea that they do is the product of twentieth-century cults. The beliefs of these cults are simultaneously naive and narcissistic, and the activism they are good and those who are evil. By contrast, sophisticated writers put the divide inside the characters they create, so that each person becomes the locus of the eternal struggle between light and darkness. It is much more psychologically appropriate (and much less dangerous socially) to assume that you are the enemy—that it is your weaknesses and insufficiencies that are damaging the world—than to assume saintlike goodness on the part of you and your party, and to pursue the enemy you will then be inclined to see everywhere.

The activism these cults promote is the resentful and lazy person’s substitute for actual accomplishment. The single axioms of the ideologically possessed are gods, served blindly by their proselytizers.

Like God, however, ideology is dead. The bloody excesses of the twentieth century killed it. We should let it go, and begin to address and consider smaller, more precisely defined problems. We should conceptualize them at the scale at which we might begin to solve them, not by blaming others, but by trying to address them personally while simultaneously taking responsibility for the outcome.
Have some humility. Clean up your bedroom. Take care of your family. Follow your conscience.
Straighten up your life. Find something productive and interesting to do and commit to it. When you can do all that, find a bigger problem and try to solve that if you dare. If that works, too, move on to even more ambitious projects. And, as the necessary beginning to that process . . . abandon ideology.

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