“Ideology is a menace” Paul Collier says in his forthcoming book The Future of Capitalism and I couldn’t agree more: ideology (and by extension morality) “binds and blinds”, as psychology professor Jonathan Haidt describes i. And ideology, especially utopian dreams by dedicated rulers, is what allows – indeed accounts for – the darkest episodes of humanity. There is a strange dissonance among people for whom political positions, ideology and politics are supremely important:
- They portray their position as if supported by facts and empirical claims about the world (or at least spit out such claims as if they did believe that)
- At the same time, believing that their “core values” and “ideological convictions” are immune to factual objections (“these are my values; this is my opinion”)
My purpose here is to illustrate that all political positions, at least in part, have their basis in empirically verifiable claims about the…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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