Step 2: Develop Your Ideological Tree
If Jane’s objective function is to please God, she might have ideologies that include human equality, Southern Baptism, Democracy, Monogamy, American-Style Democracy, and the Republican Party. While each of these ideologies represents a hypothesis about how to achieve the same objective function (e.g., pleasing God), they are not equal in importance.
Some of our ideologies are directly subordinate to others. Jane’s pro-life ideology is directly subordinate to her ideology that delineates when life begins, which is directly subordinate to her religious ideology. Altering an ideology lower in one’s ideological tree affects all the ideologies above it. Were Jane to change her ideology about what counts as a living thing, she may have to revisit her views on abortion.
Your beliefs about the world can be visualized as a tree in which a few senior ideologies inform thousands of subordinate ideologies. Even minor shifts in our understanding of senior ideologies (that is, ideologies near the trunk of the tree) affect the rest of our worldview. We should, therefore, spend significantly more time refining our most fundamental ideologies, even though we naturally dread the process of doing so, as changes we make to them send shock waves throughout all branches of our ideological trees.