Ideologies solve themselves, not the real world
Ideologies love to promise us the moon when it comes to fixing society, but if you look closely, they’re usually just tidying up the furniture inside their own heads. It all starts with a beautifully simplified map of the world that’s been stripped of its messy bits, leaving behind a few clear variables and some very tidy lines of responsibility. Inside this little bubble, everything’s perfectly logical and every solution feels like a mathematical certainty, which makes the whole thing feel incredibly powerful because it’s so internally consistent.
The trouble is, of course, that the rest of us don’t actually live inside that map, and reality has a nasty habit of ignoring the boundaries we’ve drawn for it. Real-world problems are stubborn, concrete things that happen in specific places at specific times, and they’re usually tangled up in historical baggage, weird incentives and feedback loops that don’t care about our theories. When someone tries to slap an ideological solution onto a real-life crisis, they aren’t really engaging with the facts on the ground; they’re just crossing their fingers and hoping their model is a good enough substitute for the truth.
This is exactly where things go wrong, because while these solutions work brilliantly in the abstract world the ideology’s dreamt up, they’ve got all the structural integrity of a chocolate teapot when they hit the real world. You’ll find that the more straightforward a theory feels, the more persuasive it becomes to a crowd, and yet that’s usually a pretty good sign it’s not going to survive five minutes of actual implementation. Ideologists are in the business of giving people easy answers, not in the business of fixing actual problems.
Because ideologies prefer to operate at such a lofty altitude, they end up being far too blunt for the delicate business of practical problem-solving. They tend to treat entirely different issues as if they’re just variations of the same old theme, which might look quite clever on a whiteboard but feels incredibly crude once you’re actually trying to make it work. Their appeal is obvious—it’s much easier to fall in love with a simple story than a complex reality—but a simplicity that ignores the actual details isn’t exactly a virtue. Ideologies pretend to be a toolkit for fixing society, but they’re just confusing a neat desk for a productive life.