The largest doomed ideology of the 20th century is Leninism. It powered the Soviet Union and the communist side of the Cold War. It promised something fundamentally new, a new method for organizing the state, economy, social life, and civil society. Followers of Lenin throughout the 20th century tried to put these ideas into practice. The results were not great and the Leninist idea died with the Soviet Union (or, realistically, quite a bit before that in the minds of Soviet planners).
The key thing about a doomed ideology is it proposes a large-scale reorganization of society that is either impossible to achieve or just a bad idea. People may not understand this until they try to put the idea into practice, when it proves lacking compared to our actually existing liberal-democratic-capitalist-with-redistribution system. We have a system that does things, and so an alternative system needs to be able to “out-compete” our current system. It needs to co-exist with our current system and prove to be a better alternative. It needs to win hearts and minds, it needs to satisfy material needs, and it needs to do this over a long period of time.
Doomed ideology creators/implementers either do not take these tasks seriously, or do not understand how their ideas are insufficient. They do not grasp what works about our actually existing system, and therefore create ideologies that are doomed because they fail what I term the meat grinder of reality test. In short, the unpredictable reality of other people and their decisions. You may think of this as similar to James C. Scott’s idea of high modernism, where ideologues have an idea of how the world should work that is radically different from how it actually works.
Today, reasonable people prevent many bad ideologies from going into practice through democratic systems worldwide. Contemporary doomed ideologies can, however, live in enclaves insulated from deployment. This gives them a stance of permanent critique, where ideology adherents critique the actually existing system from the position of a failed ideology, but never have to put the ideology into practice and discover its flaws. According to adherents, the ideology will always provide solutions in the future when our present economic or political system has been overcome. In reality, the ideology offers no such solutions and would fail the meat grinder test.
In this series I’ll do deep-dives into doomed ideologies as I have time. I’m going to start with degrowth, and potentially move on to libertarianism. So smash that subscribe button.
What’s my motivation for doing this? I find contemporary doomed ideologies fascinating. The most interesting ideologies are being developed in real-time by highly educated, thoughtful, smart people. They have PhD’s, they are highly sought after speakers, and they are pitching ideas that would be a disaster in practice. We can make fun of dark enlightenment nonsense, but that’s an easy target. High-caliber doomed ideologies have entire bodies of research behind them.
The people developing these ideologies in general seem like earnest and nice people. They are just wrong, and are spending their brainpower and time constructing doomed ideological edifices. I feel it’s a little bit like smart people working on crypto, a clearly useless technology which has occupied the time of many undoubted geniuses (I say this without any irony—people are smart).
We’ll examine each ideology along the following lines
What do creators think they are doing
What function does the ideology serve in daily life for proponents
What are the fundamental issues with what they are proposing
What rhetorical strategies are used to sustain their argument
It might be my background in literature, but I find the actual mechanics of argumentation used by doomed ideologues fascinating.
Along the way, I’ll refer back to a few books and articles as theoretical grounding for what I’m doing
Interested readers can access the latter three just by clicking on the link. Seeing Like a State is a widely available book and you can grasp the fundamental argument from the first 3 chapters.