Imagine that you are an ancient Athenian, responsible for some important institution, and that you have a strong belief that the overall survival of your society is contingent on a reliable, common-knowledge buy-in of Athenian institutions generally, i.e. that your society cannot function unless its members believe that it does function.
This would not be a ridiculous belief! We have seen, in the modern era, how quickly things go south when faith in a bank (or in the financial system as a whole) evaporates. We know what happens when people stop believing that the police or the courts are on their side. Regimes (or entire nations) fall when their constituents stop propping up the myth of those regimes. Much of civilization is shared participation in self-fulfilling prophecies like “this little scrap of green paper holds value.”
While this is largely right, I do want to mention that all the self-reference ultimately does have to rest on something that isn’t self-reference.
Or in a nutshell, you can’t sustain a society solely on beliefs that are purely self-reference, and this is due to the current laws of physics, which forbid creating something out of nothing, in almost all cases, which means some base level, non-self referential concepts must be the bedrock of society.
And this is where a lot of ideologies fail here, as much of society being based on self referential ideas is not equivalent to all society being based on self referential ideas and to a certain extent, I think a lot of Communist failures look like ignoring the difference between much and all of society being based on self referential ideas.
While this is largely right, I do want to mention that all the self-reference ultimately does have to rest on something that isn’t self-reference.
Or in a nutshell, you can’t sustain a society solely on beliefs that are purely self-reference, and this is due to the current laws of physics, which forbid creating something out of nothing, in almost all cases, which means some base level, non-self referential concepts must be the bedrock of society.
And this is where a lot of ideologies fail here, as much of society being based on self referential ideas is not equivalent to all society being based on self referential ideas and to a certain extent, I think a lot of Communist failures look like ignoring the difference between much and all of society being based on self referential ideas.