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Ideologies are not geometric proofs. Whatever you believe, whether it's socialism, communism, or in the Great Pumpkin, you have to live and work with other peop
by DanielBMarkham 8y ago
Ideologies are not geometric proofs. Whatever you believe, whether it's socialism, communism, or in the Great Pumpkin, you have to live and work with other people. So you gotta compromise it. And it's not like the "pure" version is so awesome and every compromise is a failure. No. No pure version of anything has ever worked, so it's all hacks to one degree or another.
- maxxxxx 8y agoWhen things don't work as promised those compromises also give the ideologues the opportunity to claim that their ideology would have worked if it only had been applied correctly.
- DanielBMarkham 8y agoYes. Political power is all about selling the dream. Various dreams sell differently to various demographics at various times. The dreams don't have to make sense, or even be implementable. People just have to buy into them. Highly-emotional, easy-to-understand dreams get a lot of buy-in. One of the things I like about my personal philosophy, which I'm not going to talk about, is that it teaches me how to lose. That is, it teaches me how to compromise with lots of other folks with different dreams. That's quite unusual. Most of the time the hardcore folks of any political philosophy are busy fighting the evil bad guys in some other group and purity-checking the folks in their own camp. There is a meta level to politics, and you can live there without sacrificing any of your values.