Dear Bob,

Thank you for your comment. I think you don’t get the point at all. You’re still thinking I’m somehow trying to “excuse” ideology or speaking from an ideological perspective. I believe that everything is ideology in the end. Facts don’t mean anything unless they are placed in a human perspective. For instance, the “fact” that a nuclear powerplant has a certain statistical chance of blowing up and contaminating the entire planet means nothing in and of itself. However, some humans will interpret that fact by saying, from their perspective, that we need to shut down the all nuclear power plants because they are too dangerous, and other humans will say that the risk is worth it, especially given the impact/disruption it will have on our energy production system. There is nothing objective here, only subjective perceptions about what is best for humans. The Universe could care less about the course of action taken on the basis of that “fact”.

Try to answer the following questions:

• Where was the “evidence” or the “facts” that capitalism was the “best” economic system in the 10th century?
• Where was the “evidence” that democracy was a better political system than autocracy of divine right in the 14th century?

The answer is: these systems didn’t exist. So which came first? The trial of these systems based on pure ideology and human will to “force” the implementation of these ideologies or careful, planned and controlled studies, peer reviewed, with decision making based on the statistical significance of a control group, one living in an autocracy, one in a democracy, followed by decades of debate between “academic PhD experts” in the field of governance and politics?

You can bury your head in the sand and pretend that we can “objectify” everything, run everything through a magic algorithm which will give us the most “objective”, fact-checked, best course of action. But reality (humans and human societies) does not work like that. All I was attempting to do in this article is shed some light on this truth, in order to avoid the sterile debate about “facts”, and skip directly to confronting the underlying ideas/ideologies. At least it is more transparent and honest to the people than disguising your true intentions and ideas behind “facts”.

In the first example I’ve given, the people against nuclear power plants might simply scared for their lives, and instead of being honest, they will say that X% statistical probability of a powerplant blowing up is a chance that society, as a whole, cannot afford to take (when it’s just them, being scared). The people for nuclear power plants may have a stake in that energy, a job, research grants, or are simply scared that they may have to pay high taxes to fund a transition to alternative energy sources.

Of course, it’s much more convenient to pretend that it’s not for “human”, subjective reasons but for “scientific”, “objective” ones, but that is simply not true.