It is common knowledge that learning is useful. Adding to one’s store of knowledge enables the application of previously observed patterns to novel situations. Physics and the other hard sciences nod together in agreement: basic principles can be applied to far-flung phenomena and surprises are banished. However, circumstances are quite different when the complexity of the issues at hand rises. Two known chemicals may repeat history when they meet, but human brains (including larger groups of them) are not bound by such clear laws. This is one of the points Thomas Piketty tries to make in Capital and Ideology: ideology is an unnatural phenomena and its implementation in practice is unpredictable. All this makes ideology an unreliable tool for managing or modifying human systems. The assumptions that are bound up in any given ‘-ism’ don’t need to be unpacked and then proven or rejected, these assumptions are a fatal flaw in ideologies.
The key is not to ignore ideologies, their development, or the language that surround them: what is needed is a grasp of ideological notions that can lead to more accurate descriptions of the details of reality. The history of ideology is a history of language people have used to describe reality (in often sweeping terms). The temptation facing leaders and people who want to change the world is to see everything in terms of a simple framework, rather than using simple frameworks to construct a complex view of what’s going on (along with the concomitant understanding of how to modify what’s going on). This gets to the heart how how learning can cause problems. False conviction is the habit of the past-learned and presently-inattentive.
Curiosity is one antidote to ideological overapplication. One explanation should never be enough for the curious person, not about a single person, a structure, or a group of people. We have language (in the form of ideologies) that can act as shorthand to describe a phenomenon from a single angle, at which point it’s necessary to use other angles. The learned are often lazy, figuring that the effort that has already gone into understanding the world can stand in for making additional efforts to understand the world as it is at this moment. There are infinite angles to view things at this and every present moment, so it is not possible to develop perfect knowledge or sight (Zhuangzi made this point thousands of years ago and he’s still right). This doesn’t mean that one must give up on the search to understand, but it means that balancing learning, observation, and conclusions is a fine and constant art.
Roman Ryan 