Building the Base of your Ideological Tree
Having been presented with the concept of an ideological tree, you may feel compelled to map your ideological tree in its entirety. Given the plethora of potential ideologies addressing nearly every aspect of life, fully mapping out your ideological tree is virtually impossible and not an effective use of your time. It is nevertheless helpful to map out the base of your tree.
The base of your ideological tree and the hierarchy of your core ideologies are important to think through, as these higher-order ideologies (at the tree’s base) will influence all your lower-order ideologies (in the smallest, farthest twigs).
Once you identify the ideologies at the base of your ideological tree, challenge them. Questioning ideologies close to the base of our trees requires monumental effort, so we are less likely to change these hypotheses over the course of our normal lives—even when we are presented with compelling evidence suggesting they are inferior or wrong. Instead, we interpret efforts to share such evidence with us as direct attacks on our personal identities and become too defensive to really think through whether our ideologies match the evidence to which we currently have access.
If you react angrily when a certain core ideology of yours is attacked, that ideology deserves special attention and extra scrutiny. Focus on ideologies that create a visceral feeling of disgust (fringe political ideologies for example). Don’t fall into the trap of telling yourself: “I don’t believe X because people who believe it have Y wrong with them.” Instead, scrutinize the ideology itself. Try to view it from a fresh perspective.
Most importantly, for all of your most core ideologies, consider what new evidence you would need in order to change your opinion. If you believe capitalism is the best economic system to support your objective function, what evidence would you need in order to change your mind and conclude that communism is preferable? Have you ever tried to find that evidence? It is remarkable how rare it is for us to seek out evidence suggesting our core beliefs about the world could be wrong, despite how beneficial such evidence would be. After all, if you are wrong about something important to you, would you not want to know?