Ideology and War

I often use the term “ideology”, so I thought I should explain what I mean by it. The Wikipedia definition is:

A comprehensive set of normative beliefs, conscious and unconscious ideas, that an individual, group or society has.

I use the term in a more specific way. As I define it, an ideology is a system of concepts and ideas that defines a social and moral dichotomy between US and THEM, GOOD and EVIL.

In this essay, I will try to explain the social function of an ideology, and how it fits into human psychology. Again, I will use the population collapse on Easter Island as an example.

See Easter Island.

Just before the collapse, there were probably about 5,000 adults and 10,000 children on the island. The children were growing up, and eating more and more food. Teenagers eat a lot. The island could only support about 10,000 adults. There was no way to expand food production. The island was already overcrowded and environmentally degraded. In fact, food production was starting to decline. Also, there was no way to escape from the island. The island was completely deforested, so there were no big trees for making canoes. Even if they had canoes, there was nowhere to go. They were trapped.

For many generations before the collapse, the islanders had been able to expand food production to keep up with population growth. Then, in a single generation, they suddenly went from abundance to scarcity. There wasn’t enough food to feed everyone, and the children were growing up. As children grow up, they need more food. Most of them had to die.

What were their options? They could have drawn lots to decide who would live and who would die, but that isn’t the sort of thing that people are willing to do. (For a good reason: suicide is a terrible reproductive strategy.) They could have fought over resources in a scramble of each against all, but anarchy isn’t stable. If two people form a cooperative unit, they can defeat almost any individual. If three people gang up, they can defeat almost any pair, and so on. They had to compete to survive, and they also had to cooperate to compete.

So, the islanders split into two groups to fight for survival. There are no written records of it, but I’m sure that’s what happened. The incentives would have made it almost inevitable. Before the collapse, they had lived together in one society with little violence. They could all succeed reproductively by cooperating with each other to exploit nature. Once they had reached the limit of food production, however, peace was no longer possible. The only way to succeed reproductively was to be on the winning side of a war. Otherwise, your children would be food for someone else’s children.

Like every society, the Easter Islanders had moral norms. They had notions of property, marriage and crime. They prohibited theft, rape and murder. They would have believed that those norms were universal moral imperatives, not merely social/cultural constructs. Once they reached the limit of their population, however, they had to violate those norms to survive. They also had to form groups that were internally cooperative and non-violent. So, they had to adopt a double-standard: non-violence for US, violence for THEM.

To maintain social cohesion, every society must prohibit internal violence. But life is competitive. To exist, a society must direct violence outward: at nature and other societies. For that reason, morality always involves a double standard: non-violence for US, violence for THEM.

The double standard is justified with ideology. Every group has an ideology that provides its members with a moral justification for violence toward outsiders. Every group has a moral narrative that portrays itself as GOOD and the other group as EVIL. These narratives take different forms, but they all justify violence against the other group. Perhaps THEY harmed US in the past. Or perhaps THEY descend from an EVIL, contemptible ancestor. Or perhaps THEY reject (our) GOD and worship the devil. Or perhaps THEY are just ugly, stupid and smelly. Or some combination of those things. Whatever the reason is, THEY ARE BAD and WE ARE GOOD, and thus we are morally permitted to kill them, take their land, and eat their children.

The social function of ideology is to justify this double standard. It gives the group an identity that is linked to a claim of moral superiority. It explains why WE ARE GOOD and THEY ARE BAD.

The Easter Islanders could have just admitted to themselves that they were, collectively, the cause of their own problems, and that there was no principled way to divide up the remaining resources. They could have just divided into teams arbitrarily, and then fought to the death over the remaining food supply. Or they could have randomly selected half the population to commit suicide. But both of those solutions go against human nature.

Instead, they divided into teams based on competing ideologies. Each side claimed a greater moral right to survival. I wasn’t there, and no one recorded the events of the Easter Island collapse, but I am sure that is what happened. That is what people always do when they are in a zero-sum game. They split into groups based on ideology, and they fight.

The individuals involved in the conflict didn’t have much of a choice. When people start splitting into factions, you need to join a faction, or be a target of both. That’s one reason why people are such conformists. If you reject your group’s ideology, then you are an outsider, and an acceptable target of violence. So, people signal their belief in their group’s ideology to avoid being ostracized. Ideological apostates usually get the harshest treatment of all outsiders, as they are not only outsiders, they are considered to be traitors.

Everyone knows that the other group’s ideology is a lie, and that the other group is hypocritical. However, they can’t see those things about their own ideology and themselves. Ideology blinds people to reality, and makes them into hypocrites. Those are features of ideology, not bugs. Ideologies use lies to justify hypocrisy. They also exist within a moral frame, and morality involves a big lie: that our collective values are the values of God, Reason or the Cosmos. The big lie of morality leads to many smaller lies.

Ideologies are dogmatic and resistant to rational arguments. People can make rational arguments against the other side’s ideology, but they can’t see (or won’t admit) that the same arguments apply to their own ideology. Again, that is a feature, not a bug. Within a group, the group’s ideology is not open to discussion or debate. It is socially obligatory.

Couldn’t someone on Easter Island have pointed out the unsustainable nature of their society before it was too late? Yes, but he would probably have been cast out of the group for heresy. Before the collapse, the islanders would have believed that they were good, and that their use of resources was justified. We also use ideologies to justify violence against nature.

Like every animal, humans need to kill things in order to live. We are reproducing machines that obey the laws of thermodynamics. We extract energy from the environment, and dump entropy into the environment.

Before the collapse, the Easter Islanders lived in peace with one another, but they were “at war” with the local environment, in a sense. Their ideology would have reflected that situation. It would have told them that they were morally superior to the rest of nature (special beings with a cosmic purpose), and thus they were justified in slaughtering dolphins to feed their children. They would have believed that their existence was good, not bad. They would have been resistant to any claim that their existence could have negative consequences.

I’m sure that they had a myth about their intrinsic goodness and their moral right to exploit nature. That myth creates a social blind spot for problems created by the society itself. People tend to blame others for their problems, not themselves. The same is true for societies.

Anyone who pointed out the unsustainable nature of their society would probably have been shouted down, ostracized or even killed.

Morality does not represent reality. It represents collective values: what is good or bad from our perspective. But it also involves the pretense that those values are not merely our values, but are cosmic in origin. Moral myths are necessary to maintain this pretense.

Moral myths tell us that we are special to the cosmos, or to God, or whatever. The truth is that we are special to ourselves. Our myths tell us that our competitors are bad from a cosmic perspective. The truth is that they are bad from our perspective. Our myths tell us that the resources we consume or destroy (animals, plants, ecosystems, etc.) were made for us by the cosmos, and are of much lesser cosmic importance than ourselves. The truth is that nothing is important to the cosmos, and we are just pursuing our own interests.

Like all organisms, we compete for resources. Nature is competitive. But society is cooperative. We create societies that are internally less competitive than nature. We don’t transcend competition by cooperating with each other. We simply transfer that competition to a higher level. Societies compete with other societies, and societies extract resources from ecosystems, at the expense of other forms of life.

Thus, society requires a boundary, and so does morality. The moral circle defines US in opposition to other societies and to nature. Ideology defines and justifies the moral circle.

We have been engaging in group conflicts over finite resources for our entire evolutionary history, with the exception of a few rare periods (such as the modern era) when production outpaced reproduction, due to some new technology or resource discovery. Abundance is rare and transitory, because populations grow until they reach a new limit. Scarcity is the normal condition of life. For humans, war is the normal response to scarcity. The survivors of those past conflicts are your ancestors. Your culture and genes come from them.

Can we transcend our violent nature by adopting an ideology of universal love and non-violence? That is part of the humanist worldview, and it has become dogma in the modern West. Humanism assumes that selfishness and violence are due to bigotry (a small moral circle), and can be eliminated by expanding the moral circle.

However, expanding the moral circle doesn’t erase the competitive nature of life. It doesn’t create new resources, and it doesn’t prevent population growth. The moral circle is used to organize competition, but it is not the underlying cause of competition.

If the Easter Islanders had held hands, hugged, and shared all resources equally, then they would all have died equally. Loving each other wouldn’t have made dolphin sandwiches fall from the skies. Anyone adopting an altruistic strategy would have died. Those who went to war had a fighting chance. Love does not conquer hate.

Humanism gets the causal relationship between ideology and violence backwards. Violence is not caused by ideology. Violence is built into the nature of life, and the propensity for violence is built into our brains. Hate is natural. Ideology is used to morally justify hate and violence, but it is not the underlying cause of hate and violence. Competition is the underlying cause of hate and violence. Ideology is just a way to organize people into groups to compete.

Of course, humanists aren’t really altruistic. They are human beings, with the same capacity for hate as everyone else. Humanists use their ideology to compete for moral status and political power. Virtue-signaling is a zero-sum game. They also use their ideology of universal love to justify hatred and violence directed at ideological outsiders (“haters” and “bigots”). Humanists are just as competitive as everyone else.

The only way to eliminate war is with honesty and rationality. We can’t remove competition from life, but we can replace one type of competition with another. We could replace war with a market for reproduction rights, in which individuals compete for the right to reproduce. With modern birth control, we could rationally limit the population without premature death. Instead of dividing into factions and fighting over scarce resources, we could regulate ourselves to maintain prosperity and peace.

To do that, we need to go beyond GOOD and EVIL.