Note: This post is mainly addressed to leftists.
A value is an idea that remains static across various opportunities to choose an action. Humans have two broad categories of values.
We naturally value wealth. Valuing wealth is the result of a selection effect. Most of the planning we do is about how to finance our next phase of development. Without wealth, this cannot be accomplished. Those who can’t finance their development fall behind. Gradually, their way of life loses representation in the future. Marxism discusses this as the working class or other forms of life reproducing themselves.
Some isolated individuals like religious fanatics or intellectuals whose needs are taken care of lose sight of the concerns of ordinary people. They falsely assume that most people are driven by a moral ideal. They think that making the world a better place involves replacing dominant ideals with their own.
Both religious and secular ideals are life-denying. They tell us to leave ordinary concerns behind and give our lives, at least to some extent, to an ideal. Realistic Conflict theory tells us that diving people into groups is sufficient to stir conflict: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory#Concept The track record of making people behave by telling them to be good is spotty at best. Bad actors simply paint their enemies as bad people and turn mobs against them. John Ganz recently posted:
In both 2016 and 2020, Trump picked up about 80% of the white evangelical vote. In general, Trump won over white Americans who regularly attend worship services, 59% to 40%. Civil society decline might be a broader context for understanding American politics, but Trump’s constituency is not mainly drawn from the atomized and lonely crowd, but from people who are well integrated into the remaining structures of American communal life.
Conservatives are listening to their trusted sources of morality, many of which share liberal values like charity and opposing war. What does this show about how morality actually functions in society?
Furthermore, values regularly become outdated as times change. We see quite often in history that old values no longer have the effect their authors expected.
People who think in terms of artificial values are those who are unfamiliar with ordinary household management and the ideologically indoctrinated. Recently, leftists have been falling for this trap. They assume fascists are driven by ideals and think they need to replace fascist ideals with leftist ideals.
It is not true that most fascists are motivated by ideals. Street interviews show fascist voters saying so themselves. Scholarship tells us that to win elections, fascists convince ordinary voters that fascism will save them from their economic woes. In order to do this, they flaunt their personal wealth. In reality, we all know the outcome looks like this:
If you think about it for a while, it’s obvious that under capitalism, those with personal wealth are often not incentivized to increase the wealth of the average voter. Fascism survives the selection process described above only because it makes a few individuals obscenely wealthy. They use their wealth to distort social institutions to their advantage. It’s their boots on the ground who pay the price.
A large part of the confusion comes from the fact that voters believe wealth comes from values: If the values of the rich are imposed on society, basically every decent person can be rich. Economics decidedly understands this to not be the case. In all schools of economics, wealth comes from cooperation for mutual enrichment, although capitalist economics focuses narrowly on trade.
To win elections, leftists should expose the hollowness of fascist promises and explain in concrete terms how leftism will make ordinary voters more well off. Voters should be made to understand that bad behavior harms them too by the standards they already hold.
This is purely a strategic plan. In no way do I mean to suggest that we should refuse to co-operate with leftists who are motivated by ideals. I myself have personal ideals (Rawlsianism), though I do not believe they are effective in public settings. Refusing to impose personal ideals on others is the more liberal position.
