You Are Probably Overgeneralising In Debates

 
Imagine starting an argument with: “Bathtubs kill thousands every year. They are immoral. They are spread all around the world like a plague, supposedly offering comfort but all they do is kill people”. You wouldn’t do that. You know better than to over-generalise in order to make a point.

As an intelligent individual you would say instead: “The Bathtubs at Mr. Anderson’s sauna parlor are very dangerous, causing serious injuries to 3 people while one died after hospital complications”. This is a completely different statement and most likely one an average person would use, if we were talking about bathtubs.

Whenever I get into discussions, supporters of one idea can overgeneralise enough to trash the whole thing right from the start. This happens only about ideologies. Never about chairs, bathtubs, cars or any other physical objects. Although ideologies and objects, are built and operated by people, they seem to be treated differently, especially when it comes to debates.
 

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Ideologies are not even tangible entities. You can’t touch or operate communism, christianity, atheism, voluntaryism. They are general ideas that encompass specific practises. Often those practises, like philanthropy and human progress, are shared from all ideologies—they were after all conceived for a better world.

Things never go as planned. This is not necessarily because of the intrinsic properties of some ideologies but rather because our planet is subject to entropy much like the rest of the universe. Constructing threads of causality onto ideologies is rather ridiculous. One can cause a cup to brake. There is a direct causal link. An ideology though cannot cause millions of deaths because there are myriads of causal interactions within that ideology. Constituting it as an agent of causality is indistinguishable from magical thinking. Nonetheless, when things go south humans can't help but overgeneralise. As causal beings we seek interpretations. Most of the time anything will do.

You can mention Communism and someone will bring Stalin’s Soviet Union as a counter argument. You mention Anarcho-Capitalism and someone else will bring Pinochet’s Chile. Nobody is immune from this whether they are Anarcho-Capitalist, Orthodox Christian, Social Democrat or anything else in between. The issues these ideologies encompass are obviously shades of gray rather than black and white. Supporters of opposing ideologies though, don’t care about gray zones. Ideologies are bred and propagated in black and white. This is afterall how they become ideologies.

 

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Being a freethinker becomes quite hard in an era of people clumping into ideological groups. Common statements like “Governments kill people” although they are as ridiculous as “Cars kill people” discourage meaningful discussion. It wouldn’t make sense to say “Abandon the automobile industry because they kill people”. So why would anyone say “Abandon the idea of Governments because they kill people?”. I adhere to voluntaryist ideals myself and never used this form of argument in order to debate a statist. I would be as naive if I did. They might replied with a simple "Well, if you don't like it Mr. Voluntaryist, leave". And they will be correct.

Some government administrations under specific leaders, influence groups of people that kill each other. This is true. One has to be very specific when debating thesse issues. In the same way some drivers that are irresponsible, do kill people by operating cars. You wouldn’t attack a Volvo factory because your neighbor run over someone with his car. Why would you do the same about “Governments” when a specific administration of a specific country causes the problem at that given time? Overgeneralising is the evolution of witch-hunt. Afterall, we are not so different from our ancestors.

“The Car” as an agent, is as imaginary as “The Government” or “God” or “Economics”. These things cannot exist as concepts unless we are being extremely specific about them. “The Fiji-Island Government” , “The Indian God Shiva”, “The Austrian School of Economics”. Language, doesn't care about reality but rather about communication. Humans developed language in order to transfer ideas, not necessarily to convey objective reality. This is rather self evident, but we tend to neglect this important fact in our discussions.
 

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“The Government” is not something that exists. “The US. Government of the Obama Administration” does. Even then, one has to be very specific. Strip down any ideologically stimulated situation and you will see that there is a person, with probably a family and children caught up in the middle, lost in tranlation. This is true whether one is a leader or a follower. A soldier did not wake up one day with an urge to kill people. Someone implanted an ideology into their head through false causalities and overgeneralizations. The person who did this also got it from someone else. You fall back enough to the initial perpetator and you end up nowhere. The problem won’t be solved if the "X” concept fails. The individuals that make up that "X" concept will still group together and form much similar ideas under "Y" or "Z". One has to shake off the idea of groupism completely, not just a general concept some people adhere to.

Governments don’t kill People. People kill people. Science doesn’t liberate humanity. People liberate or enslave each other. Science can’t make a jet engine that flies us to the moon or another that shoots missiles at our homes. Human agents operate machines and ideologies. When one overgeneralizes they are stripped from their individuality and become pawns of a blurred idea. People die because people blame individuals based on over-generalised concepts. This is why it is so easy to attack someone in an online debate rather than in person. We see the idea, not the person.

We are social beings. We can’t help it most of the time but only as individuals we can escape the overgeneralising pitfall. So, who is ready to stand alone?

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