18 Theses on Ideological Drift
How we drift toward beliefs that restore self-worth
I got into punk rock when I was 14 or 15 years old. I’d use an old peer-to-peer network called Soulseek to download albums that I couldn’t find anywhere else online. One of those albums was Complete Discography by Minor Threat. It was raw, intense, and earnest in a way I’d never heard before. When “Out of Step” came on with Ian MacKaye screaming:
I don’t smoke
Don’t drink
Don’t fuck
At least I can fucking think
I can’t keep up
Can’t keep up
Can’t keep up
Out of step with the world
Listening to that song, I thought for the first time in my life that there might actually be other people in the world like me.
Socialist politics followed naturally from a punk rock ethos. Over the next 13 or so years, my views drifted from naive socialist to classical Marxist to Anarchist to Analytical Marxist to Effective Altruist to vaguely Rationalist to whatever I am now. I described some of this process in an earlier essay.
I’d like to claim that this was a dispassionate process of slowly updating my beliefs, but I think the drift had more to do with whatever made me feel ‘out of step’ in the first place. Difficulties with social connections contributed to a feeling of low self-worth, and these ideologies allowed me to preserve enough self-worth to keep functioning socially. It was adaptive, in a weird way.
The following theses are an attempt to describe this process as clearly and concisely as I can.
Thesis 1: We cannot survive alone.
Humans face periods when they cannot meet their own basic needs: infancy, illness, pregnancy, old age.
During these vulnerable periods, survival depends on having people who will sacrifice their own interests for ours.
Link to Scott’s Substack
Thesis 2: We must behave in ways that ensure others will sacrifice for us when we’re vulnerable.
This involves building relationships, demonstrating value, strengthening bonds, showing loyalty, cooperating consistently, and behaving in ways that make others invested in our welfare.
Thesis 3: We need to track whether our behavior is successfully securing investment.
This requires a psychological tracking system that continuously measures how invested others are in us.
Thesis 4: The tracking system responds to costly signals.
Costly actions like sacrifice of time, resources, safety, or opportunity are harder to fake than cheap ones.
The tracking system weighs signals by their cost; the higher the cost, the stronger the signal of genuine investment.
Sharing food during a famine is a stronger signal than sharing food at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Signals are strongest when they appear to come from benevolence rather than strategic calculation or social obligation.
Thesis 5: We experience the tracking system’s output as self-worth.
The tracking system generates a subjective feeling based on how invested others appear to be in us.
We experience this feeling as our sense of self-worth.
High detected investment increases self-worth; low detected investment decreases low self-worth.
Thesis 6: Low self-worth motivates changes in behavior.
Low self-worth creates discomfort that motivates us to take corrective action.
This might include strengthening existing bonds, demonstrating more value, increasing cooperation, or seeking new relationships.
The goal is to secure sufficient investment from others and restore the system to equilibrium.
Thesis 7: Our tracking system is calibrated to the ancestral environment.
Our self-worth tracking system expects to see the kinds of costly signals that would have indicated investment in ancestral environments.
Link to the-wilderless’ Substack
Thesis 8: Modern environments provide fewer costly signals.
In ancestral environments, survival depended on direct help from specific people (sharing scarce food, protecting you from danger, caring for you when sick). These acts required visible personal sacrifice and created clear signals of investment.
In modern environments, our basic needs are met through impersonal systems (markets, institutions, infrastructure) and we are less dependent on specific individuals for survival. This, among other factors, has led to increasing social atomization.
When people do sacrifice for us (parents working extra hours, paying tuition), the sacrifice is often invisible or takes the form of abstract opportunity costs rather than direct, visible deprivation.
The tracking system evolved to detect costly, visible, personal sacrifice from specific individuals. Signals in the modern environment are less direct, visible, and visceral.
Thesis 9: The lack of expected signals pushes us toward low self-worth.
Our tracking system continues to measure the signals it evolved to detect and finds them largely absent.
The system cannot recalibrate to modern conditions; it still expects ancestral signal patterns.
It accurately reports that investment signals are insufficient relative to ancestral baselines.
This pushes us toward chronic low self-worth despite objective safety and material provision.
Thesis 10: The tracking system only cares about raising self-worth.
The self-worth tracking system is optimized for a single function: detect investment and motivate us to secure more when it’s low.
It is not concerned with other goals like maintaining accurate beliefs, finding food, or avoiding danger.
From its perspective, anything that raises the self-worth reading is successful, regardless of whether it actually solves the underlying problem.
Thesis 11: We can raise self-worth through behavior change or belief change.
When self-worth is low, we can raise it by changing our behavior to secure genuine investment from others.
Alternatively, we can adopt self-worth enhancing beliefs - beliefs that raise our sense of worth without requiring us to actually secure investment.
Examples include: narcissism (I’m better than other people), victim mentality (everything is working against me), externalizing blame (my problems are caused by others or society), defensive self-sufficiency (I don’t need anyone), moral superiority (I’m more virtuous than others).
These beliefs raise self-worth by reframing our circumstances rather than changing our relationship to others.
Thesis 12: Self-worth enhancing beliefs have asymmetric costs and benefits.
Self-worth enhancing beliefs provide an immediate increase in self-worth.
They can play an adaptive role by enabling alternative social strategies: restoring self-worth in itself might mitigate a depressive episode, narcissism may increase confidence to motivate continued social engagement when it might otherwise seem hopeless, victim mentality can elicit sympathy and signals of support from the community, defensive self-sufficiency can provide an alternative survival strategy if others are unwilling to make sacrifices for you.
The costs of adopting distorted beliefs: damaged relationships, poor decisions, disconnection from reality, are delayed and often invisible.
Given this structure, adopting self-worth enhancing beliefs appears rational from the perspective of the self-worth tracking system.
Thesis 13: When signals are scarce and self-worth is low, self-worth enhancing beliefs become more attractive.
In environments where costly signals are scarce, attempts to secure investment through behavior change are more likely to fail.
When self-worth is low, the tracking system predicts that others will reject us or fail to invest.
This prediction makes attempts to secure genuine investment feel particularly risky. Rejection would confirm our low worth and make things worse.
Self-worth enhancing beliefs offer a safer alternative. They raise self-worth immediately without risking rejection.
Thesis 14: Modern environments create systematic pressure toward ideologies that support self-worth enhancing beliefs.
Modern environments provide fewer costly signals, which pushes us toward chronic low self-worth.
When self-worth is low and signals are scarce, attempts to secure genuine investment are more likely to fail.
Given the asymmetric costs and benefits of self-worth enhancing beliefs, the tracking system is more likely to favor them.
This creates systematic pressure toward adopting ideologies that support self-worth enhancing beliefs.
Thesis 15: The process of adopting self-worth enhancing beliefs can repeat.
Self-worth enhancing beliefs raise self-worth to a new equilibrium.
This new equilibrium becomes normalized: the beliefs no longer feel exceptional.
If self-worth remains low at the new equilibrium, additional self-worth enhancing beliefs become attractive.
This process can repeat: adopt new beliefs, normalize, adopt more beliefs if self-worth is still low.
The system may eventually reach equilibrium, oscillate between states, or behave chaotically.
Thesis 16: Ideological drift occurs at the group level.
Groups need to attract and retain members to survive. Groups that fail to do so cease to exist.
Influential members face a tradeoff between adopting beliefs that attract members and maintaining accurate beliefs.
Beliefs that attract and retain members provide immediate and visible benefits (growth, cohesion, enthusiasm).
The costs of decreased accuracy are delayed and often invisible.
Given this asymmetric structure, adopting member-pleasing beliefs appears rational.
When these beliefs produce no immediate bad outcome, they become normalized within the group.
Once normalized, the process can repeat: the group can adopt additional member-pleasing beliefs using the same mechanism.
This produces ideological drift at the group level through a selection process that favors groups willing to adopt member-pleasing beliefs.
Thesis 17: Ideological drift can be affected by external costs, changes to the tracking system, or genuine investment signals.
External costs: When self-worth enhancing beliefs produce unavoidable consequences (relationship breakdowns, social isolation, personal crises), this can push us to revise our beliefs.
Changes to the tracking system: Medication, therapy, or other interventions can alter how the tracking system functions or reduce its sensitivity, eliminating the discomfort that drives adoption of self-worth enhancing beliefs.
Genuine investment signals: When the tracking system detects costly sacrifice from others on our behalf and registers sufficient investment, it no longer motivates self-worth enhancing beliefs.
However, ideological communities can trap members by providing a sense of community that is conditional on maintaining self-worth enhancing beliefs (e.g communities based on a shared victim mentality).
Thesis 18: Mutual loving sacrifice is the most powerful form of genuine signal.
The underlying problem is a lack of costly signals in modern environments.
The ideal solution is to provide the costly signals the tracking system expects.
Mutual loving sacrifice, where both parties make visible sacrifices for each other, provides exactly these signals.
This type of signal is what our tracking system evolved to detect and responds to most strongly.
However, pursuing this requires vulnerability, courage, and willingness to risk rejection.
This is most difficult when self-worth is already low, which is precisely when it is most needed.
This view implies that low self-worth should be considered normal in socially atomized environments. We should expect people in such environments to drift toward ideologies that support self-worth enhancing beliefs. The spread of these ideologies is not necessarily due to malice nor incompetence, but a predictable attempt to maintain psychological equilibrium in an unnatural social environment.
I’ve tried to present this theory as clearly as I can, without references to academic work or empirical research. Partly because I think the theory is intuitive on its own, and partly because I’m not an empirical social scientist. Empirical social science is difficult to do well and easy to do badly, and attempting to provide empirical support would have been disingenuous — adding only a thin veneer of epistemic authority.
But the theses are supported by credible academic theories, so as a compromise, I’ll gesture vaguely in the direction of the relevant academic literature. This is about the level of epistemic authority I feel entitled to wield.
Evolutionary psychology (including the social brain hypothesis, costly signalling, self-deception (e.g. The Elephant in the Brain), and evolutionary psychopathology) supports:
Thesis 1: We cannot survive alone. (social brain hypothesis)
Thesis 2: We must behave in ways that ensure others will sacrifice for us when we’re vulnerable. (social brain hypothesis)
Thesis 4: The tracking system responds to costly signals. (costly signalling)
Thesis 7: Our tracking system is calibrated to the ancestral environment.
Thesis 9: The lack of expected signals pushes us toward low self-worth.
Thesis 11: We can raise self-worth through behavior change or belief change. (self-deception)
Thesis 12: Self-worth enhancing beliefs have asymmetric costs and benefits. (evolutionary psychopathology)
Attachment theory supports:
Thesis 1: We cannot survive alone.
Thesis 2: We must behave in ways that ensure others will sacrifice for us when we’re vulnerable.
Sociometer theory supports:
Thesis 3: We need to track whether our behavior is successfully securing investment.
Thesis 5: We experience the tracking system’s output as self-worth.
Thesis 6: Low self-worth motivates changes in behavior.
Kaj Sotala’s multi-agent model of the mind supports:
Thesis 3: We need to track whether our behavior is successfully securing investment.
Thesis 4: The tracking system responds to costly signals.
Thesis 10: The tracking system only cares about raising self-worth.
Work on cultural evolution (Joseph Henrich) supports:
Thesis 16: Ideological drift occurs at the group level.
Steven Pinker’s work supports:
Thesis 8: Modern environments provide fewer costly signals.
Sidney Dekker’s work on organisational drift supports the general structure of drift dynamics described throughout the theses. Dekker studied why accidents occur within complex organisations. Organisations face tradeoffs between efficiency and safety, where efficiency gains are immediate and visible while the costs of reduced safety are often delayed or invisible. This creates systematic pressure toward efficiency.
Individuals make locally rational decisions about these tradeoffs, but no single person understands how their decisions interact across the whole system. Without adequate controls, safety margins erode until an invisible threshold is crossed and an accident occurs.
If you are inclined to accept these theoretical frameworks, then I think these theses are reasonable.
There was a considerable amount of tension within me when writing these theses. The analytical part of me that thinks I should remain completely dispassionate and objective. It wants to acknowledge that this is one possible mechanism among many, and that I am generalising from personal experience. It wants me to discuss counterexamples, include empirical research, and do a proper literature review. It wants to acknowledge that I have not rigorously defined my terms. I have not justified key assumptions. I have not discussed the direction of causation. I have not discussed what this theory uniquely predicts. I have not discussed whether this theory is even falsifiable. And I should make clear that human psychology is complex and multifactorial and that any single-mechanism explanation is necessarily incomplete. The analytical part of me wants to keep raising objections like this until blood runs out of my eyes and I am cold and dead on the floor.
Another part of me that thinks this theory just… intuitively makes sense. All of this hedging is unnecessary and performative. I should just say what I think is true with minimal fanfare and if it is a reasonable theory, I should trust other people to understand.
This intuitive part of me thinks everything hangs together nicely, it fits with established theories of psychology, it’s a plausible mechanism and it matches my own personal experience. It explains a connection between low self-worth and common defence mechanisms, the connection between loneliness and ideological extremism, and why self-worth is so important to mental health. The intuitive part of me thinks this theory is parsimonious and has explanatory power. There’s probably a lot of variation in how strongly people are affected by it, and this is influenced by genetics, but the aggregate effect across society could be significant. It might even explain what is driving political polarization, the mental health crisis, and whatever the hell is going on with gender relations these days.
And if this theory is correct, then it means that my own ideological journey wasn’t a moral failure but an entirely comprehensible response to unprecedented social conditions.
I can feel how strongly I want to trust my intuition. Of course, it would be wonderful for my sense of self-worth if it is correct.
Thanks to Kaj Sotala for very helpful feedback on this essay.
Thank you for this insightful post! I also find it very intuitively plausible. Interestingly, we seem to get self-worth both from being helped and from helping others. For example, when someone takes care of us when we are sick, this confirms that we are a valuable member of the group. But we also feel valuable when we are needed. One of the must under-appreciated treatments for low self-worth is to engage in volunteering helping others, thereby shifting your focus to other people’s needs, and your ability to assist. This can also pose a challenge from an EA perspective, as our boost in self-worth is not always calibrated to actual impact, leading to identifiable victim bias etc. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, this is also a good reminder to call your loved one’s and remind them that they mean a lot to you - it is a cheap signal, but still gives a lot of bang for the buck!
with You!!!