I’ve noticed that your essay doesn’t differentiate beliefs (about truth), and values (subjective preferences). This implies that ideologies approximates truth, or that truth makes people change their mind, or that you can calculate which preferences are best, and I think all of these assumptions are wrong as value judgements and pure knowledge are entirely separate.
You could argue that having a belief X results in behaviour Y which leads to better well-being for a group of people, but this is unrelated to the truth value of a belief (if it were not so, we’d be able to prove the existence of god by measuring the outcomes of people who believed in him vs those who didn’t), but this might depend on the type of belief
I’ve noticed that your essay doesn’t differentiate beliefs (about truth), and values (subjective preferences). This implies that ideologies approximates truth, or that truth makes people change their mind, or that you can calculate which preferences are best, and I think all of these assumptions are wrong as value judgements and pure knowledge are entirely separate.
You could argue that having a belief X results in behaviour Y which leads to better well-being for a group of people, but this is unrelated to the truth value of a belief (if it were not so, we’d be able to prove the existence of god by measuring the outcomes of people who believed in him vs those who didn’t), but this might depend on the type of belief