Abstract Idealism

On the mistake of loving the world only as it could be, and not for what it is.

I am an Idealist.

Simply put: I believe that we can solve many of the big problems that plague and have plagued Humanity. Furthermore, I believe that it is worth striving for.

Most people are not Idealists. They may be too pessimistic to believe that we could ever solve Humanity’s biggest problems. Or they may be too nihilistic to believe that it is worth attempting.

Naturally, I believe more people should be Idealists.

—

Sadly though, Idealism is now tainted. While it initially meant to act based on one’s ideals, it has taken a negative meaning.

Wiktionary defines what an “Idealist” is in two ways:

1. Someone whose conduct stems from idealism rather than from practicality.

2. An unrealistic or impractical visionary.

I tend to think of Idealism through this first definition. Idealists strive to go beyond their practical needs, that are usually selfish and short-sighted. Instead, an Idealist conducts themselves based on their Ideals.

However, most people have in mind the second definition, that of an “unrealistic or impractical visionary”. Ie, the type of people who will rave about some utopia without ever suggesting legibly good policies or acting pro-socially.

It hurts, but I get it. Almost all the Idealists that I have met were like that.

And I think they are like that because of one critical mistake.

In this essay, I’ll go through 6 examples of the mistake. I’ll then dub it “Abstract Idealism” and analyse it.

Once I’m done, I hope we start re-building a positive vision for Idealism :)

Examples

“If everyone would just…”

Years ago, “squareallworthy” wrote a short note on Tumblr:

If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.

It’s a great note.

—

It truly captures very quickly how Idealists often mix up their imagination and the real world. “Imagine if every did [a thing]” quickly becomes “Everyone should do [the thing]”, which itself finally morphs into “If only everyone would just do [the thing]”.

Nevertheless, I personally think there is value in pondering hypotheticals in the shape of “What if everyone would do [a thing]”.

You may have heard of Kant’s Categorical Imperative:

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

In other words “When thinking of a moral principle, ask yourself: what if everyone followed it?”

And historically, Kant’s work on the Categorical Imperative has been very fruitful. It became the inspiration for many moral systems, and a component of many more. That’s why I think there’s value in considering it.

—

However, a proper Idealist should not stop at this, at “If everyone would just…”

While it is a useful moral consideration, there are many more!

For instance, a proper Idealist should also consider many other hypotheticals, among others:

• “If I would just consistently…”, in other words: what are principles that are good to follow consistently, at an individual level?

• “If the people close to me would just…”: what are principles that are good for families and friend groups to follow?

• “If a 100 people would just…”: what are principles that are good for communities to follow?

• “If I would just try for a month…”: committing to a principle for an indefinite period of time is hard, and requires a lot of uncertainty. But what are principles that are good to follow even for only a month?

—

To me, Idealists who only ever consider the “If everyone would just…” hypothetical feel like they are obsessive. And also, their obsession is a bit lame.

Like, consider an Idealist who obsessed on the “If a 100 people would just…” hypothetical. They can cheaply test their their theories and their whacko ideas. They just need to create a Discord server and gather as many people as possible interested in the idea. They can even start with a group-chat of 10 people, experiment with them and extrapolate a little what it may look like with a 100 people.

Whatever results they find, it would be cool and interesting, if oftentimes stupid. That would make for a cool obsession!

But, in comparison, the “If everyone would just…” obsession is quite dull. It’s not testable. You can’t play with it in real world. You can’t just have everyone in the world try [a thing] for 5 minutes.

As a result, the main way to interact with an “If everyone would just…” idea is abstract reasoning. Thought experiments, debates with others, formal models, symbols, words, words, words. It lacks substance, it lacks juice, it lacks reality. This is how Abstract Idealism feels to me nowadays.

“After the Revolution”

“After the Revolution” is another Idealist trope.

It is common in Marxist circles. There, the Revolution is about taking down The System. And The System is a bit of everything: Capitalism, the State, the Patriarchy, White Supremacy, Extractivism (Wikipedia), Colonialism and more.

The thesis is that the Bad Institutions are taken down, Marxists will be free to do what is best!

Coincidentally, “After the Revolution” is also common in reactionary circles. The extreme historical examples are the National Socialist Revolution and Mussolini’s Revolutionary Nationalism.

—

Without going to the extreme of Communism or Fascism, “After the Revolution” has already caused a lot of damage through technocrats with comparably fewer autocratic tendencies.

Two recent and notable examples of this are Dominic Cummings and Elon Musk. They both believed that the institutions of their country (the UK and the US) had to be taken down to pave the way for glorious change.

They believed that such a radical change warranted propping up a leader in which they didn’t believe. It didn’t work out for them: Dom got ousted after 18 months, Elon after only 6.

But beyond them, it led to results that went directly against what they were aiming for!

Following the Brexit, the UK hit record high rates of immigration, although curbing immigration was the main reason to leave the EU.

And the US got into record levels of debt, when reducing spending was the main reason to give DOGE access to everything!

—

I have found that people drawn to “After the Revolution” do not want to govern.

Governing is a pain.

In functioning societies, no one unilaterally holds all of the power. As a result, a major part of governing involves negotiating and trading-off with people who disagree with you.

And I have found that the people who love the Revolution are typically the people who hate negotiating and trading-off with people they disagree. The ability to bulldoze and not having to do so is often one of the major things they want out of the Revolution!

So instead of governance, they spend most of their time fantasising about having power, making sweeping changes and crushing their opposition. In comparison, they think very little about organising to improve existing institutions. They’d rather scheme and undermine them.

Their actions make things worse for everyone. But as they do so, they will claim it’s Good, because it’s in the name of The Revolution.

I think Revolutionary Idealism may literally be the type of Abstract Idealism that has caused and causes the most damage.

Pacifism, Love, Non-Violence, and Niceness

Peace and Love is yet another Idealist leitmotiv.

It starts with the idea that we should all cultivate niceness and avoid meanness. That the more we do so, the better things get.

It continues with the one that we should avoid conflicts, avoid wars, and disarm.

—

This is very different from the “If everyone would just…” mentality.

The people preaching Peace and Love are not saying that we need everyone to do it before the world gets better.

On the contrary, even at an individual level, their philosophy often works. When one starts avoiding conflicts, their life does often becomes quieter. This is the opposite of he “If everyone would just…” mentality.

Instead, the problem of Peace and Love approach is that it is usually parasitic.

The only reason why Love Everyone people can Love Everyone is because they can afford the luxury of avoiding people who will exploit that ruthlessly. For many (most?) people, that is not a luxury they have. If you start being a little too compassionate in lower-class places, you get screwed over very quickly.

The only reason why “nice” people can nevertheless enjoy thriving communities is because when there are bad people doing bad stuff, others will have to deal with it. Others will get their hands dirty, engage in conflicts and punish norm violators. If there was no one doing that, their communities will decay and collapse.

The only reason why pacifists can preach pacifism is because they live in places that are protected by well-equipped armies. Peace is ultimately supported by military might. Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war.

—

Peace and Love is a refusal to engage with the reality that many people are power-hungry, psychopaths, terribly traumatised, incapable of understanding the consequences of their actions, or badly morally confused. Being nice to them doesn’t work. At worst, they must be removed from society. At best, they can be tamed.

The reality is that at least some resources, people, norms and institutions must be fully dedicated to dealing with this reality. Policemen, judges, parents. They have to punish people. They have to do things that are bad.¹

People in these roles have to be mean even when it doesn’t make sense to others. Because of their role, they will know more about the evils committed by bad people and what happens when you don’t deal with it swiftly or severely.²

People in these roles will make some mistakes. They are not omniscient. And their mistakes are very costly: these are matters of life-and-death, and of freedom or prison.

More tragically, some people in these roles will commit offences and abuse their power. We do not have a selection process that lets us identify perfect moral beings, nor do we have a training program that lets us create them.
As a result, we must live with abuses of authority, which are certainly disgusting, but are in fact part of the costs of living in a society.

The above is very harsh. I have seen a few people embrace Peace and Love Idealism as a reaction to it.

“AGI will fix this”

This is a modern form of idealism. Sci-Fi, some may say.

And yet, it is now a common refrain from a few extremists racing to build Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as fast as possible.

We must race to AGI because it’s going to solve everything! World hunger, cancer, politics, wars, everything.

Even more important, it’s going to let us conquer the stars, create trillions of new beings who can experience crazy sensations and extreme amounts of pleasure, and capture the light-cone of all future value (as Sam Altman stated)!

—

To an AGI Idealist, any postponement is a moral catastrophe.
And nothing is as important as AGI, anything on the way there is justified.

Extreme power concentration.

Corrupting governments through massive lobbying expenses or outright bribes.

Acting against the precautionary principle and introducing massive changes to the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Bypassing legal regimes (OpenAI vs Copyright, xAI vs likeness rights).

Partnering with terrible people and entities.

Automating all jobs without any alternative for people losing them.

Automating scamming, cheating, deep fakes, and many other criminal and immoral enterprises.

Creating entirely new addictions and destroying load-bearing institutions.³

Ignoring the consent of people and racing away toward what could be humanity’s extinction or dystopia.

—

It is all justified, all in the name of their vision of what AGI could potentially bring.

It demands complete faith.

None of the bad things or the power concentration that happens in between can be taken as evidence that their vision is wrong.

—

To be clear, AI development has brought a lot of good things too.

But let’s say one was to suggest a pause, a slow down, democratic consent, building more reliable institutions first, or anything like that. (Like I do.)

Then, you’ll get to witness a torrent of bad faith.
Employees of AI companies complaining that slowing down is impossible because they are locked in a race; even as they block any attempt at regulation that would impact all companies.
Hawks complaining that there is a race with China; even as they lobby to export more tech and hardware to China.

And most importantly: AGI Absolutists who will clearly state that any slow down, any hurdle, any democratic process that might pump the brakes, is unacceptable. Because the benefits are far too great, because we may delay the birth of trillions of sentient aliens, and things like that.

“There is a mathematically better way to do things!”

I know many Idealistic nerds.

They love working on new protocols, new software, new mathematical models, new coordination mechanisms, new nerd shit.

Prediction markets, quadratic voting, futarchy, game theory, blockchains, privacy preserving cryptography, sortition, DAOs, reputation graphs, etc.

And I get it! I find all of it fun!

—

It is sadly ineffective.

For nerds, there are basically two ways to evaluate whether an idea is a good one.

The first is to mathematically show that it is superior to the real world, according to some model.
The second is to get other nerds to like it and say it’s cool.

In either case, the idea does not interact with the real world at all. It is completely ungrounded.

For instance, many nerds love political systems. They love making models of politics, and discussing it with other nerds.

But it would be completely alien to them to go to their fellow citizens and politicians, and to ask them what would actually help them with their civic engagement. This is far outside their usual practice.

—

For example, when I was a bit younger, 15 years ago, there was a lot of noise around voting systems. There were lots of talks that the voting systems used in Western countries prevented the emergence of new politics, new parties, and led to only having 2 options to choose from. Talks about Duverger’s law or Hotelling’s law applied to voting systems.

There were models explaining why, if something was outside what the two dominant parties were considering, it was practically impossible to make it into law. People complaining about The Overton Window. “Woe be us nerds! The Maths have shown that our ideas can’t be passed!”

And then, Trump took over the Republican platform in the US, Dominic Cummings got the Brexit done in the UK, and Macron destroyed the historical left-right alternation in France.

It was actually possible all along, but the nerds were too focused on nerd shit to instigate change.

“Politics is useless.”

This one is not a specific type of Idealism. It’s more of a pattern that I have found across many Idealists.

Psychoanalytically, I would say that it an obvious justification for laziness and doing nothing.

It is pervasive among Artists and “free thinkers”.

It’s the assumption that politics is useless. I hate it with a passion.

—

When I write “assumption”, I mean specifically that it is an assumption. It is when people assume that politics is useless.

I don’t mind if someone has seriously tried to do politics, and concluded that it was useless. I would likely disagree with their conclusion, but I wouldn’t necessarily mind.

However, too many people just assume so.

They got memed. They were screwed over by social media, memes, movies, tv shows, and talking to stupid people.

They are completely lost in the worlds of fiction and social bullshit. They can’t distinguish them from the real-world anymore.

As a result, it was enough to constantly hear “Politicians are corrupt” and “Politicians are stupid” to end up believing it. And after that, to then spread it to others like a mind-virus.

—

Not once, did they try to contact their local representative to understand one of their decisions or make a suggestion. Or their mayor, or their MP, or their staff, or whatever.

Not once did they attend a town hall meeting and try to contribute something.

They never thought about interacting with the real-world. They don’t know what it could look like.

And yet, they confidently assume it’s all useless.

Their entire understanding of the world is predicated on that. Were they convinced that politics was useful, what they say and do would change quite a bit!

However, even though they could quickly get some information on that by themselves, without having to rely on anyone, they don’t. They literally just assume.

—

This is a destructive belief.

In my life, I have experienced two seemingly contradictory conversations quite a few times.

The first is conversing with a policy maker who lacked direct expertise in a field that they were investigating, and who was interested in getting more information and advice from an expert.

The second is conversing with an expert who never talked to any policy maker ever, because of their assumption that it was useless.

To the best of my knowledge, that assumption is at the core of why most smart people I know avoid interacting with politics.

I believe this is happening all around the Western world, and it is a core reason for why smart people have deserted any political institutions.

As a result, I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that a great part of the decay of our institutions is directly caused by this destructive belief.

Analysis

There is a central mistake that ties all of these examples together.

The mistake is sadly a natural outcome of being an Idealist.

—

To be an Idealist is to imagine an Ideal world. A world very different and much better than the current one.

Everyone has this ability. It’s childlike imagination. It’s envisioning an etymological utopia, a good place.

But the real world constantly erodes our imagination. It wears down people. It rewards people who further the status quo. It mocks Idealists. It belittles attempt at being genuine and deeply caring about non-mainstream things.

As a result, Idealists tend to be people whose inclinations are strong enough to resist this barrage from the real world.

An inclination to naturally spend time in imaginary worlds, of their own creation. Regardless of what the real world throws at them, they keep on doing so.

In a way, it is a natural and necessary part of building a vision, as an Idealist.

—

On one hand, the very strength of an Idealist is their ability to resist the assaults of the real-world and keep on dreaming.

On the other hand, it leads to the very mistake I warned about, which I call Abstract Idealism.

Abstract Idealism is a type of Idealism that has stopped paying attention to the real world, and focused solely on an abstract Ideal world instead.

To an Abstract Idealist, the real world becomes a prosaic concern, a transient state, a means, or an implementation detail. It stops being a thing that matters in its own regard, let alone being the thing that matters.

What matters instead is the Ideal world, however abstract it is. It becomes what the Idealist spends most of their time thinking about, their fascination, the only thing worth caring about.

With that in mind, let’s reframe a couple of the examples above in terms of Abstract Idealism.

Reframing

To the Communist, the current capitalist world doesn’t matter. It is completely fair to sabotage its institutions, destroy what took people a lot of work to build, and so on.

What matters is the glorious world that comes after the revolution. To the extent that it accelerates the advent of the Ideal World, it is even morally good to damage our current institutions.

—

To the AI Accelerationist, the current world doesn’t matter.

To them, it is completely fair to subvert democracy, ignore legal principles established over decades or centuries, spread the means to cheat and generate deepfakes, create new addictions, fan the fires of war between the US and China, accumulate extremes amount of power, and risk literal human extinction.

What matters is the glorious transhumanist world that comes after AGI. Everything pales in comparison.

—

In the two examples above, committing the mistake leads to evil.

This is not always the result of the mistake. The more usual one is irrelevancy.

To the Communist and the AI Accelerationist, the real world is a means to their vision. But to the nerd, it doesn’t even matter.

What matters is the math, the code and the elegance of the systems they design. Finding places where they are useful or getting them adopted is an afterthought.

In many nerd cultures, it is considered a great success to build a system that others nerds would recognise as great, even if it never gets implemented.

In many nerd cultures, it’s actually a greater success if the system designer can come up with a story for why normies dislike the system and would never implement it! It makes all nerds look like misunderstood geniuses, and reinforces the idea that the world would be so much better if the normies just decided to finally listen to the nerds.

On the contrary, ensuring that what they design is useful requires interacting with normies. But on top of being bad at it, nerds truly hate it. So it rarely gets done, if at all.

This is why we end up with so much useless argument mapping software, coming from nerds who try to come up with improvements to debates without talking to the people who take part in high-stake debates.

—

Sometimes, the mistake leads to not pure evil or irrelevancy, but to a banal type of evil. Not an evil borne out of hate, but out of accidental ignorance.

Many artists spread a lot of bad sentiments against The System, without ever having tried to make it work. They are not evil-evil, they are just ignorant and incurious.

These ignorant people actively create a victim culture. They write songs and scripts where everyone is a victim of The System. Where the System doesn’t “listen to the people.”

From their point of view, a point of view which they constantly preach, it’s the job of The System to be nice and listen to them.

It completely rejects the notion that people should proactively learn about, understand, maintain, and improve The System.

It ignores the fact The System results from the efforts of regular people in the past, and should be tended to by the regular people from the present.

That people are The System.

As a result, through sheer weakness of character and lack of curiosity, these artists have caused considerable damage to our institutions, by spreading immense amounts of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

Self Perpetuation

Tragically, Abstract Idealism is self-perpetuating.

Because Abstract Idealism ignores the Real World, it doesn’t receive any correcting feedback.

To a Communist, only what comes after the revolution matters. Whatever evidence they get from before the revolution doesn’t matter, whatever damage they cause before doesn’t matter, and so on.

To an Artist who avoids Politics, only what’s outside of politics matters. They may cause millions of people to avoid politics, but they don’t even see the damage because they never paid attention. It’s not like they followed how engaged people were with their political parties, or asked politicians if they wanted people to reach out to them.

To an AI accelerationist, only the post AGI world matters. They may screw everything up there and literally risk extinction, but it doesn’t matter. The current world doesn’t inform their post-AGI views.

To a theory nerd, only their pet theory matters. It doesn’t matter that no one cares about it, that it is used by no one, or that no one expressed a need for it. It is enough cope that sometimes, nerd topics accidentally end up being useful.

—

It is not a coincidence that Abstract Idealism self-perpetuating.

To some extent, all personality traits must be, in one way or another. There’s always a reason for why people are stuck in their ways.

I have written about the most common reasons: Compulsions (things people can’t help doing), Traumas (things people can’t help avoiding), Distractions (things that people can’t ignore) and Entropy (things that decay without maintenance).

These reasons are deep, and it usually takes quite a lot of inner work or special circumstances to transcend them.

But it is possible to do so. And I hope this essay at least helps with the first step: identifying what may be going wrong.

Conclusion

Abstract Idealism may be one of the biggest problems that I face on a daily basis. While I am lucky to regularly meet people who want to do big things, most fall prey to the Abstract Idealism failure.

I don’t think the solution to Abstract Idealism is staying grounded, using Science, or to always test things against real world. These are all symptoms, not root causes.

When one truly cares about a problem, they naturally tend to focus on grounded solutions. In a deep way, the problem of Abstract Idealists is that they don’t care about the real-world, they only care about abstract problems from their ideal worlds.

I have my personal take for a solution, which I may eventually come to call Full Idealism.

In short…

Idealism is loving the world as it could be.

Abstract Idealism is only loving the world as it could be. It is neglecting the world as it is, to the point of internally living in one’s Ideal World.

Deeper lies Full Idealism: loving the world as it could be, loving it as it is, and loving it as it transforms from the latter to the former.

I may write more about what Full Idealism means in practice, but that’s for another time.

On this, cheers!

1. Even when it is necessary, it is in fact still bad to imprison people. In other words, it is a necessary evil. We live in a harsh world, and punishing people is often the lesser evil.

2. It is expected that people will regularly feel bad about their decisions.

I find it despicable when uninformed Peace and Love people leverage this for their cause.

3. AI-optimised Social Media has created a deep addiction to smartphones. And the same has also displaced traditional media (such as newspapers, radio stations and TV channels) in favour of an unregulated hellscape where foreign opponents and internal enemies have a field day.