Nazis in Charlottesville and the role of 'centrists'.

The recent disgusting display in Charlottesville, where thousands of fascists and nazis¹ where demonstrating their hatred and bigotry, triggered a lot of bashing against centrists, libertarians and people from the liberal camp². At first that made me a little puzzled. I frequently identify myself as a centrist liberal and I was trying to understand why people were blaming people like me for what happened. Than I understood what happened: there were actually a lot of self styled centrists and libertarians defending the Nazis from Charlottesville! This prompted me to write about why anyone who calls himself liberal absolutely can't stand in the sidelines when Nazis are marching.

Ideology acquisition

When I saw some comments by supposed liberals/libertarians/centrists defending people with Nazi flags the first question I asked myself is where the hell this people got their labels from? Have you even read about the ideology your saying you support?

This is a delicate subject because it's an error to think that most people choose their ideological labels after careful logical consideration of all possible positions. There's evidence that a lot of different cognitive abilities -- from basic moral reasoning to evaluating the validity of complex philosophical arguments -- are, more often than not, informed by gut feeling first followed by post-hoc justification and rationalization {% cite schwitzgebel2017rationalization %} instead of rational evaluation. More than that, there's evidence that when we make decisions the actual higher order cognitive processes that lead to that decisions are unaccessible even for ourselves: we can't introspect them to understand why we made such decisions, but we create internal theories about why we decided for A instead of B, and that's what we report on our rationalizations {% cite nisbett1977telling %}. Choices of ideology are also strongly influenced by our social interactions. Of course there's the fact that conformity to social norms can even influence our very perception, as shown by the famous 1951 Asch Experiment {% cite asch1951effects %} (and we have some evidence of the neural mechanisms by which that happens {% cite klucharev2009reinforcement lieberman2006pain %} -- it's related to the same mechanism that makes you learn, and the mechanism that teaches you to avoid physical pain).

So, in summary, most of the time the process of adopting and idea starts with that warm feeling in your stomach, that comforting notion that this sounds like a good idea. After that you concoct some after-thought rationalization of why you think that's a good idea. But the fact is that this rationalization often times is not accurate: you have no access to your internal decision process, you have only a guess of what made you decide for one thing or the other.

So, what I believe are the most important driving factors in most cases of someone adopting a given ideology -- and I believe that's the case even for ideas that I hold, and even for why I adopted many of my own ideas -- are simple social mechanisms. And those are among the factors that we most often we'd like to discount and deceive ourselves about their importance. Those factors are things like adopting a belief to conform with what our social peers believe; or because a figure of authority holds similar beliefs; or because we were exposed to them when we were kids; or because it is fashionable in our social group to do so; or because they are the views of a community where we felt accepted and welcomed, and became a part of. Those social factors prime us to feel good when hearing some key concepts and we then tend do accept those views.

My conclusion is then that lots of people saying they're libertarian, or economically liberal, or centrist, just because those ideas are being amply discussed, publicly elaborated by many figures of authority, and are labels held by lots of communities and social groups. And also, they're fashionable and likable. Ideals like freedom, ability to do what you want without being arbitrarily restricted by the government, giving up less of the product of your work to support a machinery that you don't understand and don't benefit you -- those are all things that feel good when you say them. We all like those ideas, and they are behind numerous historical developments of very wide ideological affiliations. There are even online tests like The Political Compass that almost force you to identify as some kind of libertarian. All of this exposes people to those labels and prime them to accept those labels easily.

But in order for a label to become a deep world view and not just a label, it requires a lot of reflection, introspection and self critique. And also a lot of reading and information. There's not a lot of people practicing those activities. This implies that there are a lot of people adopting those fashionable labels whose deep views are not that different from what their parents believed. Lots of people acquire those labels superficially, without actually acquiring views about what they really mean.

And, of course, there's also people that style themselves as defenders of certain popular ideologies as a deliberate distraction from their real views ³. But I really believe this last group of "cryptos" is small. There's this old adage about attributing things to malice when a simpler explanations exists.

Self examination and self skepticism

The limits of every idea is reality

What I believe as a liberal and why I abominate Charlottesville's nazis

References

{% bibliography --cited %}{: .text-left}

Footnotes