Ideoculture

Two young fish are swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
-David Foster Wallace

If you spend any large amount of time in a community that discusses things, particularly online forums, you will probably get brainwashed by the community ideology. This happens by a process of gradual alignment towards status incentives. This article is about fleshing out the “community ideology” concept and using it for some reactionary political analysis. It’s mostly obvious in retrospect, but hopefully the cataloging of this phenomenon can help you mitigate some of the brainwashing going forward by pointing out the “water” that you swim in.

Personal Example

I’m a big fan of chess (bear with me). I’ve played it for many years as a serious hobby and plateaued around 2100, a step below having a real master title that I could use to brag about to women. I browse the chess subreddit very often, as a way to stay engaged with the game.

The other day I saw a guy at the gym doing chess puzzles on his phone between sets (chess has gotten a boost of popularity in recent years due to some combination of engaging chess streamers, the pandemic, the Queen’s Gambit Netflix series, and the Hans Niemann butt plug fiasco). I struck up a conversation, and he said he was a beginner and asked for improvement advice. And so I advised him with perfect confidence that he should spam tactics puzzles and not worry about anything else until he got to a rating of 1200. It feels great to help out new players!

But holding up my confidence to basic scrutiny, I find it clearly misplaced. It’s been many years since I’ve first got through beginner to the 1200 level. I don’t play against players anywhere near that range, so I don’t have a good understanding of how they think about chess or their strengths and weaknesses. I’ve never done chess coaching to others, so it’s not that I’ve seen evidence of beginners taking this advice or another and getting different results. And this advice is not what I did personally; as best as I can remember I learned a wide range of things to reach 1200. So...why the hell did I give this advice? By all counts, the right response to his question should have been “I don’t know”.

I gave this advice because it’s an ideocultural canon of the chess subreddit. On posts where beginners ask for advice on how to improve, this is the type of advice that gets the most upvotes. How this ended up convincing me went like this:

When I first saw highly upvoted comments giving this advice, I thought about it for a couple seconds, and figured it made some sense; it fit together with other highly upvoted opinions on beginners in the subreddit (“beginners lose the game in one or two move tactical blunders”). Implicitly, I figured that all those upvoting people must know what they’re talking about.
The next couple of times I saw such comments, the idea was already familiar and “vetted”, so I gave it an upvote. The more such comments I upvoted the more convinced I became.
Eventually, I started writing the comments myself, and farming the upvotes. It didn’t exactly feel like karma farming, since I thought I was giving genuinely good advice. Propagating the idea myself convinced me completely.

This brainwashing system is baked in to the design of Reddit.

If even such an emotionally unarousing and non-tribal belief as this chess improvement advice can sneak its way into the brain with no evidence, just from consistently engaging with an online community and absorbing its beliefs, what hope is there for staying rational with politics?

Defining Ideoculture

An ideology is an interconnected set of beliefs, values, and attitudes. Ideologies can be solitary, developed and held by a single person. Ideoculture encompasses a wider phenomenon that can only manifest around a community, especially a community where discussing ideas is a primary activity. Naturally, online forums, where discussion is the only activity of the community, are where you find the most well-developed and stringent ideocultures. Ideoculture is built out of things such as:

Popular beliefs (including informal ones that are not in the formal ideological canon, if this is a community that has such a thing)
Popular patterns of thought
Popular patterns of dialectic (usually ending up in a disparagement of the outgroup, or an affirmation of the ingroup).
Popular talking points
Popular jokes/memes (laugh tracks are there for a reason, humor is part of community cohesion and we are wired to find funny what others find funny)
Language norms (e.g. formal vs informal language being venerated)
Defined enemies, and a shared caricature of them.
An unstated understanding of what type of evidence or issues one should pay diligent attention to, and what type one should quietly avoid.

To earn status in such communities, one must produce linguistic output that conforms with the above, affirming the ideoculture. On Reddit, all subreddits have ideocultures to varying degrees, and the easiest way to get upvotes is to learn the inherent ideoculture and echo it back in your posts and comments.

Agreement and Disagreement

Not all ideocultures are equally guilty in distorting their members’ views of reality. One simple and useful axis with which to judge them is agreement/disagreement.

Is disagreement discouraged, tolerated, or encouraged? Or perhaps the ideoculture allows vigorous disagreement on most topics, but ostracizes disagreement on sensitive, foundational ones. Whatever the case, you can be certain that the more disagreement a community allows, or even encourages, the more you can trust the resulting consensus. The greater the diversity of ideas, the greater the fitness of the idea that wins. For those ideocultures that encourage disagreement in one area but agreement in another, you should only trust them in the areas where disagreement is encouraged. In some rare ideocultures, like the hard sciences, a well argued/evidenced attack on their foundational beliefs will cause you to be celebrated by the community and have you be adopted as one of its heroes. This is a sign that you should take their ideological consensus very seriously!

Now why do so many political communities, especially activist ones, form ideocultures of high agreement? How does it benefit them to be systematically uncalibrated with reality? Typically they have other considerations than epistemic accuracy. High levels of group agreement bestows power to the group in the real world. A group of arguing philosophers does not make for a great protest, but a group of unworldly young people who have internalized a common ideoculture of agreement certainly does. The leaders of ideocultures which inherently have a strong imperative to effect some sort of political change, understand this implicitly and influence the group culture to encourage agreement. In 21st century American journalism, the ideocultural pressure to slant writings in favor of woke narratives is called “moral clarity”. The purpose, of course, is to shape the minds of the populace towards agreement with the ideology of journalists, rallying them to favorable political action. Moral clarity is really morale clarity.

The more an ideoculture encourages disagreement, the more truthful its beliefs become. The more an ideoculture encourages agreement, the more power its members gain to exert over society. This naturally leads to toxic politics.

Wokeness and other Revolutionary Ideocultures

What is woke? Wokeness is a label for the wider ideoculture of Critical Theory. Critical Theory is a philosophical progression of Marxism, a method of analysis geared towards conceptualizing society as a system of dominance of one identity group over another. Whereas original communism was concerned with the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, Critical Theory is concerned with the domination of men over women, or of Whites over Blacks, or of straights over gays, or cis over trans. The wider ideoculture of wokeness gives the system of domination different names depending on the different groups involved: patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, etc. It is an ideoculture of very high agreement, demanding strict affirmations and exaggerations of the existence of systems of domination, punishing transgressors with cancellation. It encourages seeing the domination system in the smallest things, such as microagressions, and simultaneously campaigns for crude discriminations in favor of the oppressed group and against the oppressor group. The ideoculture is oriented towards creating political and wider cultural change to destroy the domination system, and due to the strong incentivized agreement, there is no mechanism to stop the movement from going too far.

Wokeness is not totally new. It can be compared against other revolutionary ideocultures, those that saw society as an unjust domination of an oppressor group, and believed the old order must be overthrown and its residues purged in order to create a new and just one. Sister ideocultures include those of the revolutionaries of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Russian Communist Revolution, the American Revolution (surprisingly violent), and the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror. A bit more distant, perhaps a second cousin rather than a sibling, is Nazism which saw its society as dominated by malevolent Jews, and sought to remove them completely from public life. Compared to these older ideocultures, wokeness is at least not so physically violent.

Liberalism as a Recessive Ideoculture

American “Liberalism” can be distinguished from other forms of Classical Liberalism (which favors the institutions of Liberal Democracy, and includes both American Liberalism as well as other modern groups like Libertarians and Conservatives) by a moral orientation that prioritizes Care/Harm over all other moral foundations. Thus Liberals are for various civil rights movements and a strong welfare state, but not necessarily for affirmative action. Some inequality of outcome is acceptable. When pressured by woke activists, however, with narratives of historical grievances leading to systems of domination that continue to exist, Liberals mostly yield, and sometimes convert. Wokes are a motivated minority compared to placated liberals, and thus wokes take over Liberal institutions. An ideoculture of agreement needs fewer members to overpower an ideoculture that permits disagreement. Perhaps American Liberalism was just too permissive in the first place, too heterodox and careful to try to live with its enemies. Perhaps it was inherently recessive and vulnerable to replacement by a more intransigent ideoculture, and it was just a matter of time and which would be the first to arrive.

How are you Brainwashed?

It’s easy to notice the brainwashing and groupthink of the people you disagree with. But if you are the type to care about being aligned with reality, you should take note of the ideocultures that you participate in. Do they encourage agreement or disagreement? What canonical beliefs and attitudes have you assimilated without supporting evidence or rumination? Have you adopted preferred ways of thinking that haven’t empirically shown to lead to correct beliefs or useful action/results? Have you been conditioned to look for evidence that confirms your beliefs, or pay special attention to certain phenomena and ignore or dismiss others?

I’ve found that cataloging the concept of ideoculture has helped me notice it much more often. I’ve become a contrarian in the anonymous and non-anonymous communities I take part in, being the person who always comes in to deflate the energy when someone is going overboard. You learn to relish the downvotes.