Ideological purity will only alienate you from everything and everyone in your life, because the stuff of life is mediation between unique beings, almost none of whom would, if tested, match up to the perfect efficiency vaunted by an ideologue.
It is a mistake to try to create a perfect society. Those who do so make the perfect the enemy of the good. A society – a body politic – must, before it strives for efficiency in production, cater to the needs of its citizens.
One could say that political purity, or efficiency if you like, is an oxymoron. Politics – the public thing – and purity/efficiency – the unreachable ideal. Emphasis on thing.
One can’t legislate as though one’s subjects are all soulless Starcraft builders. One can’t inspect society in terms of pure efficiency as though they’re looking at an Age of Empires map. Proper individual political action is to protest for issues that directly affect you. It is to improve your community by personal action. It is not to have endless hypothetical ideological debates with people online.
Should you find yourself in the position of wanting to be more intelligent than you are – or even just wanting to be seen that way – the following applies:
It’s like trying to win the Bathurst with a Mini Cooper. You might get close – you might even win – in an intellectually dead age. But in a real competition there’s no contest, and you won’t gain any wisdom from it, and you’ll leave no one with anything they couldn’t find somewhere else.
This is because intelligence plays an objective role in your life. A will always equal A, and when added to B will always become C.
Wisdom (in its manifestation in your life) is subjective. That which is ‘best’ from an objective perspective is not always ideal. Intermediate steps are needed to adapt variations from the mean, for which a society is designed, into a form society can understand, work with, provide for.
(The real trick is designing a society with the correct ‘mean values’ such that all political variance within it is able to come to a centre which functions for all at a minimum level.)
It is necessary to adopt wisdom, not cultivate intelligence, because you can become wiser, but you can’t make your brain bigger. Wisdom is what allows you to act politically properly, because it accounts for what’s happening in the real world around you, and discards dead ideology when necessary.
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