I think you can pick on some of the specific points in the essay, but the large picture is basically right. You can often tell you're in an ideological debate

I think you can pick on some of the specific points in the essay, but the large picture is basically right. You can often tell you're in an ideological debate when the same old points are trotted out over and over. Tax is theft, capitalism is oppression, that kind of stuff. When you talked to a person who has bought in, they always have an answer to everything, and it's the same rehearsed answer squished into whatever thing you're discussing each time: doing X reduces my freedom, having to do Y is the capitalists bullying everyone. The thing that ideology really buys you is a complete weltanschauung. That in itself is dangerous. If you don't have any doubts about what you're thinking, you'll never change it. In fact, you won't even be thinking, just repeating, like times tables. Your fellow travelers will congratulate you when you make a comment they like, but it's like learning a playbook. It simply won't occur to you that you might be wrong, or that other people might have legitimate views. The only way to wean yourself off this sort of non-thinking is to try to seek discomfort. I try to not label my thinking with common labels like capitalism, libertarianism, communism, and so on. Those words tend to mean a wide variety of things to people that they often can't articulate, and once you identify with them you'll be held to account for views that other people think you have that they nonetheless cannot fully explain. You yourself will not be able to fully explain them either, because intellectual history is pretty big and you can't cover everything. I try to just address whatever issue is at hand without tying it to a big idea that will then end up being the source of a stream of what-abouts.