One more side note, I am actually glad that, you as one of the author of this post are aware of the existing body of scholarship and the broader historical reality of the world’s politics. My concern was whether you are trying to reinvent the wheel while substantial body of work has been produced about this topic. I apologize if I have been overly provocative.
The second generation of the Frankfurt School, particularly Jürgen Habermas, also addresses the totalizing tendencies in the first generation’s argument, though that is a separate discussion.
I think your response raises important criticisms, but some of the disagreement comes from talking past what the theoritical argument is actually trying to do, and I also may be oversimplifying what I intend to convey for the sake of clarity but lost its nuances in the first place. It may help to narrow the disagreement rather than treat it as a choice between Enlightenment reason vs. its critics. (PS: I don't think we're disagreeing much here.)
OnNazism and Dialectics of Enlightenment
You are right that the movement was openly anti-liberal and hostile to many Enlightenment ideals. It rejected universalism, elevated myth and authority, and subordinated evidence to ideology. In that sense, describing Nazism as a direct product of Enlightenment thinking is historically misleading.
What thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno were trying to claim however was different. They were not claiming that Nazis were faithful heirs of Enlightenment values. The argument is that Enlightenment reason contains an internal tension: the drive to master nature through calculation and control can, under certain historical conditions, narrow into what they call “instrumental reason”. This form of rationality focuses on efficiency and domination while detaching itself from ethical reflection and critical self-awareness. Their concern is that modern societies could retain technical rationality while losing emancipatory aims. Whether one agrees or not, the argument is about a tension inside modernity, not a simple causal claim that reason produces barbarism.
On technology, bureaucracy, and moral reasoning
Your distinction between technological efficiency and Enlightenment commitments to truth-seeking is correct. Yet the critical theory concern is precisely that these can become decoupled. A society may maintain scientific competence while weakening norms of criticism, pluralism, or moral restraint. The historical question is whether this decoupling is accidental or structurally enabled by modern forms of organisation. In other words, the disagreement is really about whether this separation is accidental misuse or something modern institutions make easier.
On Cold War violence.
Critics are usually making a narrower claim: that existential framing during the Cold War allowed liberal states to suspend their own norms in practice. Works like The Jakarta Method are less an argument against liberal philosophy than an attempt to show how geopolitical fear reshaped moral boundaries on the ground.
The concern about critical theory becoming unfalsifiable is also somewhat fair. Some versions do slide into treating every appeal to reason or universality as disguised power, which collapses into skepticism about knowledge itself.
But the stronger version of the tradition is closer to a warning than a rejection: that reasoning always happens inside institutions and power structures that can distort it. The productive version of this insight is methodological modesty: reason operates within institutions and incentives that can distort it. The unhelpful version is total suspicion.
The disagreement should be located between these two readings rather than framed as reason versus anti-reason. One reading treats reason primarily as a normative commitment: evidence, logical consistency, revisability of beliefs, and universal standards for justification. In this view, failures such as ideological violence occur when societies abandon reason or fail to live up to it. The problem is moral / institutional deviation.
The other reading treats reason as historically situated. It asks how particular forms of reasoning become dominant, which questions are considered legitimate, what kinds of evidence are prioritised, and how certain assumptions become invisible background conditions. The focus shifts from whether reasoning is used correctly to how epistemic frameworks themselves are formed and stabilized.
From that perspective, the issue is epistemological rather than anti-rational.
I don’t think the inference is “Indonesia happened, therefore one must adopt Marxism,” or even that Marxist literature is uniquely authoritative. My point is narrower.
If the concern is ideological fanaticism, then understanding the internal logic of influential ideologies seems like a reasonable starting point. Reading historians who describe outcomes is valuable, but it is different from engaging with the conceptual frameworks that shaped how people understood the world in the first place. Marx matters here not because he must be agreed with, but because his ideas shaped large parts of twentieth-century political imagination, including the reactions against them.
To me, this is closer to studying something at its source. If one wants to understand a disease, it helps to examine the organism itself rather than only reading accounts of its effects. Marxist thinkers, in that sense, are part of the intellectual laboratory of modern ideology, just as liberal or conservative thought is.
I also don’t think this needs to be framed as Marxist literature versus good history. Historians like Odd Arne Westad are valuable because they reconstruct events: who acted, under what constraints, with what consequences.
Social theory, however, serves a different purpose. It asks why certain ideas became convincing in the first place, what assumptions about human nature or society they carried, how they defined concepts like progress, justice, or rationality, and how those assumptions structured perception before decisions were even made. It helps explain why intelligent, enlightened people could sincerely believe they were acting morally while producing destructive outcomes. In other words, history tells us what happened and how; theory tries to explain how certain ways of thinking made those outcomes intelligible or even necessary to the actors involved.
Fun fact: Marx wrote something literally titled "The German Ideology" — and despite the title, it is not about fascism.
Did you know that after the communist purge, Western powers helped install one of the most corrupt regimes on earth under Suharto in Indonesia, a regime that lasted for 32 years? That period (until -1998) fundamentally shaped why Indonesia is still struggling to build functioning democratic institutions today. Institutional weakness, oligarchic power, and entrenched corruption remain structural problems. Now Suharto’s former son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto, is president. The consequences of the purge are still lived by 280 millions of people today (Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world by size and population).
From where I stand, when violence and ideological destruction happens outside the developed world, why it often becomes framed as a regrettable but acceptable cost of protecting the “right” ideology. This begins to resemble a form of hipocritical moral hierarchy.
Are lives in parts of the world that do not fit comfortably within Western ideological purity treated as expendable?
At what point does defense of a “good” ideology begin to resemble the very fanaticism being warned against?
If the topic is ideological fanaticism, then isn't dismissing Marxist or left thinkers outright risks becoming the very same dogmatic certainty being discussed in this post (and ultimately, preventing truth-seeking principle?). I understand your instinct, but refusing engagement is different from critique.
Furthermore, Marxism/Marxist thoughts should not be reducible to merely authoritarian histories; it has generated analyses of ideology, capital, state power, and development across the social sciences, this is my overall point.
(Modern-day China complicates this type of anti-Marxist tendencies. Whatever one thinks normatively, it has overseen massive poverty reduction and economic transformation under institutions influenced by Marxist frameworks, plus point, without soliciting bloody wars or subjugation as it happened in European history. This is studied extensively by now mainstream economists such as Yuen Yuen Ang's How China Escaped the Poverty Trap , Ha-Joon Chang's Kicking Away The Ladder, Dani Rodrik's Globalisation Paradox, etc. Engagement with Marxist literature is not necessarily ideological endorsement but may also provide ample empirical evidence.)
Hi, I’m a Chinese-Indonesian scholar currently doing a PhD in sociology. I read your piece carefully and want to offer a point that may help situate your argument within a broader intellectual tradition.
Your discussion frames ideology primarily as a problem of fanaticism—beliefs hardening into rigid, self-sealing systems. In sociology and cultural theory, ideology has been examined for decades as something more structural and historically embedded. The core issue is not only extremity, but how certain forms of reasoning become normalised as neutral, rational, or universal. Long-term risk often emerges not from overt zealotry, but from the quiet stabilisation of particular epistemic frameworks.
A substantial body of scholarship has analysed these dynamics:
The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) — critique of Enlightenment rationality and instrumental reason, developed in response to European wars and fascism, arguing that rationality itself can become a tool of domination and large-scale violence when reduced to calculation and control.
Louis Althusser — ideology as material practice embedded in institutions that “interpellate” subjects before conscious belief forms.
Antonio Gramsci — hegemony as the production of common sense through consent rather than force.
Stuart Hall — ideology as articulated and negotiated within cultural and political struggle.
Pierre Bourdieu — symbolic power and habitus as mechanisms through which domination becomes misrecognised as natural.
Edward Said — knowledge production as entangled with geopolitical power.
Gayatri Spivak — the structural silencing of subaltern positions within dominant epistemic frames.
Frantz Fanon — the internalisation of domination at the level of identity and embodiment.
The Frankfurt School is particularly relevant here. Writing in the aftermath of European catastrophic wars, their concern was precisely how societies that considered themselves rational, enlightened, and culturally advanced produced industrialised war and mass destruction. Their argument was not that irrational fanaticism caused these outcomes, but that Enlightenment rationality itself, when reduced to instrumental calculation, could be mobilised toward domination. Rationality became a tool for administration, efficiency, and war-making. The critique was directed at Europe’s own self-understanding: the belief that progress, reason, and technical capacity were inherently emancipatory. Their warning was that ideology often operates most effectively when it presents itself as reason.
From my perspective as an Indonesian, this is not abstract. The United States presented liberal democracy as a universal emancipatory framework while materially supporting anti-communist purges in my country during what is often called the “Jakarta Method". Between 500,000 and 1 million people were killed in 1965–66, with encouragement and intelligence support from Western powers. Variations of this model were later replicated in parts of Latin America. These histories remain marginal in many Western discussions of liberalism and global governance. Yet they demonstrate how an ideology framed as freedom and rational order can coexist with large-scale violence.
The broader point is this: ideological danger does not arise only from fanaticism at the margins. It can also emerge from confident, systematised, ostensibly rational worldviews that see themselves as universal and benevolent. Any serious analysis of long-term ideological risk should therefore include scrutiny of dominant liberal and technocratic frameworks, not only their extremist counterparts.
Positivism asks: What is true, measurable, and generalisable? Within this frame, Effective Altruism privileges phenomena that can be quantified, compared, and optimised. What cannot be measured is not merely sidelined but often treated as epistemically inferior or irrelevant.
German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, Nobel laureate for his foundational work in quantum mechanics, explicitly rejected positivism:
“The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.”[1]
Heisenberg’s critique points to a basic flaw in positivism: when clarity is achieved by cutting away what cannot be neatly expressed or measured, the result is not deeper truth but a thinner, more trivial understanding of the world.
Non-positivist traditions are plural (anti-positivism, post-positivism, postcritique, etc.) rather than unified. They include interpretivism, hermeneutics, constructivism, critical theory, historical/genealogical analysis, indigenous or situated knowledge, and many more.
What they share is a rejection of the idea that reality becomes fully knowable once it is rendered measurable. Knowledge is understood as partial, situated, historically contingent, and shaped by language, institutions, and power. Measurement is treated as one way of knowing among others, not as a privileged filter that separates “real” knowledge from the "other".
This also helps explain why I think EA tends to shy away from politics and direct activism. These domains are hard to measure cleanly. You can’t easily run counterfactuals on democratic backsliding, elite capture, or institutional decay. So within the EA paradigm, they end up looking messy, speculative, or methodologically unsafe.
But to me, this avoidance is a real loss. If you only optimise within existing systems and never confront how those systems are structured, you risk reinforcing them. It’s hard not to see this as part of the reason democratic institutions, especially in places like the US, have been hollowed out while plutocratic power keeps consolidating.
One text that really shifted how I think about linear things like “technology” is Langdon Winner’s Do Artifacts Have Politics? Winner’s point is simple: technologies are never just technical.
The epistemic dominance of positivism within the Effective Altruism paradigm constrains its truth-seeking potential by marginalizing non-positivist forms of knowledge.
Hi, I’m Indonesian, and I have to disagree. While China has serious human rights abuses, the U.S. has also committed grave crimes, particularly through its global interventions.
For example, in 1965, the U.S.—along with the World Bank under Robert McNamara—helped install a dictatorial regime in Indonesia, supporting General Suharto, who went on to become the world’s most corrupt leader. In the process, at least 500,000 to 1 million people were massacred, falsely accused of being communists. This brutal anti-communist purge, known as the Jakarta Method, was later replicated in multiple countries, including Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, with devastating consequences.
Given the U.S.’s direct role in facilitating mass killings, coups, and authoritarian regimes worldwide, I’d argue that its crimes against global humanity might be worse than China’s.
Book Reference:
- Bevins, Vincent (2020). The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
- Robinson, Geoffrey B. (2018). The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66
One more side note, I am actually glad that, you as one of the author of this post are aware of the existing body of scholarship and the broader historical reality of the world’s politics. My concern was whether you are trying to reinvent the wheel while substantial body of work has been produced about this topic. I apologize if I have been overly provocative.
The second generation of the Frankfurt School, particularly Jürgen Habermas, also addresses the totalizing tendencies in the first generation’s argument, though that is a separate discussion.
Hi there :)
I think your response raises important criticisms, but some of the disagreement comes from talking past what the theoritical argument is actually trying to do, and I also may be oversimplifying what I intend to convey for the sake of clarity but lost its nuances in the first place. It may help to narrow the disagreement rather than treat it as a choice between Enlightenment reason vs. its critics. (PS: I don't think we're disagreeing much here.)
On Nazism and Dialectics of Enlightenment
You are right that the movement was openly anti-liberal and hostile to many Enlightenment ideals. It rejected universalism, elevated myth and authority, and subordinated evidence to ideology. In that sense, describing Nazism as a direct product of Enlightenment thinking is historically misleading.
What thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno were trying to claim however was different. They were not claiming that Nazis were faithful heirs of Enlightenment values. The argument is that Enlightenment reason contains an internal tension: the drive to master nature through calculation and control can, under certain historical conditions, narrow into what they call “instrumental reason”. This form of rationality focuses on efficiency and domination while detaching itself from ethical reflection and critical self-awareness. Their concern is that modern societies could retain technical rationality while losing emancipatory aims. Whether one agrees or not, the argument is about a tension inside modernity, not a simple causal claim that reason produces barbarism.
On technology, bureaucracy, and moral reasoning
Your distinction between technological efficiency and Enlightenment commitments to truth-seeking is correct. Yet the critical theory concern is precisely that these can become decoupled. A society may maintain scientific competence while weakening norms of criticism, pluralism, or moral restraint. The historical question is whether this decoupling is accidental or structurally enabled by modern forms of organisation. In other words, the disagreement is really about whether this separation is accidental misuse or something modern institutions make easier.
On Cold War violence.
Critics are usually making a narrower claim: that existential framing during the Cold War allowed liberal states to suspend their own norms in practice. Works like The Jakarta Method are less an argument against liberal philosophy than an attempt to show how geopolitical fear reshaped moral boundaries on the ground.
The concern about critical theory becoming unfalsifiable is also somewhat fair. Some versions do slide into treating every appeal to reason or universality as disguised power, which collapses into skepticism about knowledge itself.
But the stronger version of the tradition is closer to a warning than a rejection: that reasoning always happens inside institutions and power structures that can distort it. The productive version of this insight is methodological modesty: reason operates within institutions and incentives that can distort it. The unhelpful version is total suspicion.
The disagreement should be located between these two readings rather than framed as reason versus anti-reason. One reading treats reason primarily as a normative commitment: evidence, logical consistency, revisability of beliefs, and universal standards for justification. In this view, failures such as ideological violence occur when societies abandon reason or fail to live up to it. The problem is moral / institutional deviation.
The other reading treats reason as historically situated. It asks how particular forms of reasoning become dominant, which questions are considered legitimate, what kinds of evidence are prioritised, and how certain assumptions become invisible background conditions. The focus shifts from whether reasoning is used correctly to how epistemic frameworks themselves are formed and stabilized.
From that perspective, the issue is epistemological rather than anti-rational.
I don’t think the inference is “Indonesia happened, therefore one must adopt Marxism,” or even that Marxist literature is uniquely authoritative. My point is narrower.
If the concern is ideological fanaticism, then understanding the internal logic of influential ideologies seems like a reasonable starting point. Reading historians who describe outcomes is valuable, but it is different from engaging with the conceptual frameworks that shaped how people understood the world in the first place. Marx matters here not because he must be agreed with, but because his ideas shaped large parts of twentieth-century political imagination, including the reactions against them.
To me, this is closer to studying something at its source. If one wants to understand a disease, it helps to examine the organism itself rather than only reading accounts of its effects. Marxist thinkers, in that sense, are part of the intellectual laboratory of modern ideology, just as liberal or conservative thought is.
I also don’t think this needs to be framed as Marxist literature versus good history. Historians like Odd Arne Westad are valuable because they reconstruct events: who acted, under what constraints, with what consequences.
Social theory, however, serves a different purpose. It asks why certain ideas became convincing in the first place, what assumptions about human nature or society they carried, how they defined concepts like progress, justice, or rationality, and how those assumptions structured perception before decisions were even made. It helps explain why intelligent, enlightened people could sincerely believe they were acting morally while producing destructive outcomes. In other words, history tells us what happened and how; theory tries to explain how certain ways of thinking made those outcomes intelligible or even necessary to the actors involved.
Fun fact: Marx wrote something literally titled "The German Ideology" — and despite the title, it is not about fascism.
Did you know that after the communist purge, Western powers helped install one of the most corrupt regimes on earth under Suharto in Indonesia, a regime that lasted for 32 years? That period (until -1998) fundamentally shaped why Indonesia is still struggling to build functioning democratic institutions today. Institutional weakness, oligarchic power, and entrenched corruption remain structural problems. Now Suharto’s former son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto, is president. The consequences of the purge are still lived by 280 millions of people today (Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world by size and population).
From where I stand, when violence and ideological destruction happens outside the developed world, why it often becomes framed as a regrettable but acceptable cost of protecting the “right” ideology. This begins to resemble a form of hipocritical moral hierarchy.
Are lives in parts of the world that do not fit comfortably within Western ideological purity treated as expendable?
At what point does defense of a “good” ideology begin to resemble the very fanaticism being warned against?
If the topic is ideological fanaticism, then isn't dismissing Marxist or left thinkers outright risks becoming the very same dogmatic certainty being discussed in this post (and ultimately, preventing truth-seeking principle?). I understand your instinct, but refusing engagement is different from critique.
Furthermore, Marxism/Marxist thoughts should not be reducible to merely authoritarian histories; it has generated analyses of ideology, capital, state power, and development across the social sciences, this is my overall point.
(Modern-day China complicates this type of anti-Marxist tendencies. Whatever one thinks normatively, it has overseen massive poverty reduction and economic transformation under institutions influenced by Marxist frameworks, plus point, without soliciting bloody wars or subjugation as it happened in European history. This is studied extensively by now mainstream economists such as Yuen Yuen Ang's How China Escaped the Poverty Trap , Ha-Joon Chang's Kicking Away The Ladder, Dani Rodrik's Globalisation Paradox, etc. Engagement with Marxist literature is not necessarily ideological endorsement but may also provide ample empirical evidence.)
Hi, I’m a Chinese-Indonesian scholar currently doing a PhD in sociology. I read your piece carefully and want to offer a point that may help situate your argument within a broader intellectual tradition.
Your discussion frames ideology primarily as a problem of fanaticism—beliefs hardening into rigid, self-sealing systems. In sociology and cultural theory, ideology has been examined for decades as something more structural and historically embedded. The core issue is not only extremity, but how certain forms of reasoning become normalised as neutral, rational, or universal. Long-term risk often emerges not from overt zealotry, but from the quiet stabilisation of particular epistemic frameworks.
A substantial body of scholarship has analysed these dynamics:
The Frankfurt School is particularly relevant here. Writing in the aftermath of European catastrophic wars, their concern was precisely how societies that considered themselves rational, enlightened, and culturally advanced produced industrialised war and mass destruction. Their argument was not that irrational fanaticism caused these outcomes, but that Enlightenment rationality itself, when reduced to instrumental calculation, could be mobilised toward domination. Rationality became a tool for administration, efficiency, and war-making. The critique was directed at Europe’s own self-understanding: the belief that progress, reason, and technical capacity were inherently emancipatory. Their warning was that ideology often operates most effectively when it presents itself as reason.
From my perspective as an Indonesian, this is not abstract. The United States presented liberal democracy as a universal emancipatory framework while materially supporting anti-communist purges in my country during what is often called the “Jakarta Method". Between 500,000 and 1 million people were killed in 1965–66, with encouragement and intelligence support from Western powers. Variations of this model were later replicated in parts of Latin America. These histories remain marginal in many Western discussions of liberalism and global governance. Yet they demonstrate how an ideology framed as freedom and rational order can coexist with large-scale violence.
The broader point is this: ideological danger does not arise only from fanaticism at the margins. It can also emerge from confident, systematised, ostensibly rational worldviews that see themselves as universal and benevolent. Any serious analysis of long-term ideological risk should therefore include scrutiny of dominant liberal and technocratic frameworks, not only their extremist counterparts.
This is probably a simplification but I'll try:
Positivism asks: What is true, measurable, and generalisable?
Within this frame, Effective Altruism privileges phenomena that can be quantified, compared, and optimised. What cannot be measured is not merely sidelined but often treated as epistemically inferior or irrelevant.
German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, Nobel laureate for his foundational work in quantum mechanics, explicitly rejected positivism:
Heisenberg’s critique points to a basic flaw in positivism: when clarity is achieved by cutting away what cannot be neatly expressed or measured, the result is not deeper truth but a thinner, more trivial understanding of the world.
Non-positivist traditions are plural (anti-positivism, post-positivism, postcritique, etc.) rather than unified. They include interpretivism, hermeneutics, constructivism, critical theory, historical/genealogical analysis, indigenous or situated knowledge, and many more.
What they share is a rejection of the idea that reality becomes fully knowable once it is rendered measurable. Knowledge is understood as partial, situated, historically contingent, and shaped by language, institutions, and power. Measurement is treated as one way of knowing among others, not as a privileged filter that separates “real” knowledge from the "other".
This also helps explain why I think EA tends to shy away from politics and direct activism. These domains are hard to measure cleanly. You can’t easily run counterfactuals on democratic backsliding, elite capture, or institutional decay. So within the EA paradigm, they end up looking messy, speculative, or methodologically unsafe.
But to me, this avoidance is a real loss. If you only optimise within existing systems and never confront how those systems are structured, you risk reinforcing them. It’s hard not to see this as part of the reason democratic institutions, especially in places like the US, have been hollowed out while plutocratic power keeps consolidating.
One text that really shifted how I think about linear things like “technology” is Langdon Winner’s Do Artifacts Have Politics? Winner’s point is simple: technologies are never just technical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_and_Beyond
The epistemic dominance of positivism within the Effective Altruism paradigm constrains its truth-seeking potential by marginalizing non-positivist forms of knowledge.
Hi, I’m Indonesian, and I have to disagree. While China has serious human rights abuses, the U.S. has also committed grave crimes, particularly through its global interventions.
For example, in 1965, the U.S.—along with the World Bank under Robert McNamara—helped install a dictatorial regime in Indonesia, supporting General Suharto, who went on to become the world’s most corrupt leader. In the process, at least 500,000 to 1 million people were massacred, falsely accused of being communists. This brutal anti-communist purge, known as the Jakarta Method, was later replicated in multiple countries, including Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, with devastating consequences.
Given the U.S.’s direct role in facilitating mass killings, coups, and authoritarian regimes worldwide, I’d argue that its crimes against global humanity might be worse than China’s.
Book Reference:
- Bevins, Vincent (2020). The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
- Robinson, Geoffrey B. (2018). The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66