Dark Mirror Ideologies

What's far more reasonable and does seem to exist are people who have values that are not the opposite, but weigh the tradeoffs differently. Take for instance someone who is on a diet vs the Grill Dad ideology: a person on a diet can certainly agree with the Grill Dad about food being delicious, but believe that the health effects are net worse.

It needs to be said that Darth Vader is not simply a villain who believes in the force but uses it for evil. He sincerely wants peace for the galaxy. In terms of goals Darth Vader and the Jedi ultimately want the same thing, or at least neither of them want &quot;evil&quot;. Where they disagree is he just believes the best way to achieve peace is through gaining power, that&#x27;s it.<p>It&#x27;s essentially a contest of peace through control (order) vs peace through trust (balance), and for that matter the Jedi are not even successful in sustaining their beliefs.

Sure, in general accusing your opponents of just being You But Evil is boring and betrays a lack of Theory of Mind but consider the people who believe that our modern society with all of its comforts could only occur under the free markets we have but simultaneously believe that these comforts are bad.<p>“What a caricature! You fool why would anyone believe that! Your opponents are not saying that!”<p>But what if they are? Famously bananas in winter would not exist and that would be good.

Seems to me there are quite a lot of people for whom the cruelty of what they&#x27;re doing really <i>is</i> the only point, whatever other arguments they might make.

I really like the example of dark grill dads. Not only because it&#x27;s funny, but it&#x27;s strikingly memorable and gets the point across.<p>The absurdity of it really sells the idea.

This concept is worthwhile, but the author is so focused on malice that he neglects real examples. For example, I think many people agree with vegans about animals’ capability for suffering, and don’t WANT to increase it, but just don’t consider it worthy of moral consideration. The factual beliefs are the same, but the moral choices are diametrically opposed.<p>Similarly, many (not all!) conservatives and liberals basically agree about the effects, positive and negative, of immigration. But one side doesn’t want those people here, and one does. You don’t need to have different beliefs about the world to be on exact opposite sides of that issue.

OK, but consider that _my_ opponents are genuinely Dark Mirror ideologues. Silly of the author not to consider that.

I can’t say this is true, but it seems to me that Peter Theil views René Girard’s ideas on scapegoats and mimetic theory as correct, but views them not as an identification of the flaws we must outgrow as a species, but as a feature to be used to control and rule.

So basically mirror in author&#x27;s view presumes two groups with the same set of beliefs, they agree on the phenomena, they agree on validity of certain laws, they even agree on the ultimate outcome. They only differ on the nature of the outcome, one group thinking it&#x27;s good, one group thinking it&#x27;s bad.<p>For me, that&#x27;s not actually a mirror. A mirror effect will change everything to 180 degrees, not just some parts.

A theological point:<p>&gt; Even should you go to the ends of the earth and find some weird fringe sect that strictly professes perfect classical trinitarian doctrine, but also that God is bad actually<p>Satan (and atheists) seem to spend more time claiming that <i>they</i> are God; that <i>their</i> subjective truth trumps objective Truth.

I have another somewhat related observation. If you don&#x27;t think or don&#x27;t know how to think about your ideas your broadly (because the communication is saturated, or you lack any context), your opponents often get to dictate your beliefs. This is when you know either them or what their propaganda describes as the worst caricatural evil.<p>For a model example, you are a peasant in old Christian Europe, you don&#x27;t know any learned humanism or anything like that, so you turn to witchcraft--as it is described by the preachers to you. Also it is common among young people who can be raised in a very controlled environment where the authority figures shut out any opposing views: so either you submit, or your only alternative is the (often objectively) horrible things they describe as the enemy. Of course they won&#x27;t tell you there are other options besides that, and you are very unlikely to come up with them by yourself.<p>I would also say this plays a role in the society&#x27;s spiral of internet radicalization. People rarely know basic boring political theory and ideologies, non-ragebait history post WW2 etc. If you are fully jacked into twitter-likes like that, your worldview is gonna largely consist of someone&#x27;s Satans adopted out of ignorance and spite.

&gt; Dark Liberals agree that democratic institutions, free speech, a free press, human rights, tolerance for differences, and a cultural melting pot are all essential parts of maintaining a free society<p>Honest question - is the &quot;cultural melting pot&quot; thing considered a liberal ideology in the USA, now? It was my impression that nowadays its considered an offensive bad thing, not &quot;a strength of the USA&quot;.

So Open Source is like a dark mirror version of Free Software. Open Source thinks that there&#x27;s benefit in programs being free, but also that defending their freedom is actually a bad thing.

We can more limited variants of the dark mirror ideology though. For example, we can imagine someone who believes all the tenets of Marxian Communism and uses the analysis to maximize his own advantage, so that he if he is a large property owner ends up doing all the things that Marxists expect large property owners to do-- perhaps he even pushes a liberal ideology in public, but this kind of limited-dark-Marxism in private.<p>I think the dark liberalism of this essay is a real ideology commonly held by marginal dictators, think Lukashenko. I also don&#x27;t think this kind of limited-dark-Marxism is unusual.

I feel like the author is discovering the facts vs opinions situation and its implications.

Would &quot;accelerationists&quot; would be dark mirror types?

Funny that the article mentions the minimum wage debate but forgets that its like the original example.

I find ideologies and ideologues off putting.

There are many ways to define opposites. This author demands that the &quot;dark mirror&quot; person wants the exact opposite, but that is way too specific in my opinion.<p>Then it&#x27;s more interesting with cases like William Cowper. Who certainly believed in anything a Christian in his time and place was supposed to believe, including double predestination. It&#x27;s just that unlike most who believed that, he was convinced he was predestined for hell. He didn&#x27;t go around doing evil things, of course, what would be the point of that? But he was very, very distressed.<p>Likewise, I think the author underestimates how much Marxist historical materialism was viewed as a hard science in much of the world, until the cold war. There were certainly capitalists who were terrified it was true, but could not see any way out of it for themselves, because just like Cowper&#x27;s double predestination, orthodox Marxism denies that there is such a thing.

&gt; fully commit to wickedness, inverting all the foundational moral goals<p>Mm, reminds me modern russian orthodoxy.