Strive to Separate Your Values from Your Worldview
The cut will never be perfect, but the exercise is worthwhile
"Caution: SHARP knife be careful" by Charlie V. Antonio is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
One of the big themes of the Sharpen Your Axe project is the way that conspiracy theories can act as the bodyguards to ideas that are failing to connect with the world outside our heads. This shortcut will always appeal to us when we feel that our identity is under threat from evidence that we believe contradicts it. What can we do to minimise the risk of this happening?
I strongly believe that we should strive to separate our values from our worldview as much as possible. If we do this well, it should make us much less prickly when our views receive a little criticism or feedback.
Sadly, it will be impossible to make a perfect cut, regardless of how much we have sharpened our axes. Our values will always tell us something about how we see the world; and our worldview will always tell us something about what we feel to be important. Even so, thinking about how to make the cut is an interesting exercise for people who want to be reflective.
I first began grappling with these issues way back in the late 1980s when I was a teenager. As I have written before, I was a committed socialist when the Berlin Wall fell. Luckily, I was studying philosophy at the time, so I had the time and space to do some reading and thinking about the difference between my values (based on solidarity) and my worldview (based on distrust of markets and an overdeveloped sense of my own capability to redesign society). As a result of this exercise, I ended up as a moderate social democrat with liberal tendencies, a short but significant step away from being a full-blooded socialist.
My thinking has continued to evolve as I have become older. One of my most significant experiences has been joining a financial journalism and data startup as an early employee in my early 30s. The company went on to become one of the world’s few journalism unicorns by the time I was in my late 40s (a unicorn is a former startup with a valuation north of $1 billion). This experience has led me to appreciate value creation much more than many moderate social democrats, making me much more liberal than I was as a younger man.
In the rest of this week’s essay, I will briefly describe how I see my values and my worldview in 2024. I am not necessarily trying to sell these to you, although if you want to copy them, you are of course most welcome! Instead, think of this essay as an example of one split. The real magic happens when you game out your own version.
In the footnote to a previous essay, I described my values in ten words: “personal freedom, shielded from executive power, and tempered by solidarity.” As I went on to say, personal freedom correlates with a market economy; and shielding freedom from executive power aligns with the institutions of liberal democracy; while solidarity underpins the welfare state. Elsewhere, I call this combination institutionalism, which I contrast with populism (defined as the ideology of narcissistic political leaders, who believe their views embody “the will of the people,” while seeing the views of the other side as being invalid).
As I went on to say in the previous essay, institutionalist values “clearly have their roots in the French Revolution, with personal freedom descending from liberté; being shielded from executive power coming from equality before the law (or eqalité); and solidarity having its roots in the final value of fraternité.”
These values also contain something of my worldview. The underlying concept is negative, particularly the idea that power corrupts. A market economy is meant to create incentives for some ultra-ambitious individuals to create value for others, particularly through innovation, instead of just stealing other people’s stuff, which has always been the easiest way of becoming rich throughout most of human history. Liberal democracy is meant to remove power from elected officials that have been in office for too long; and prevent a market-based economy from degrading into gangster capitalism. Also, our species mostly evolved without markets; and some of us will need a certain degree of protection from a market economy at least some of the time.
On the other side of the cut, we have my worldview. I think that the world is very big and very complicated, while our brains are very small. Suspending judgement is always going to be better than jumping to conclusions. We should seek as much information as possible before coming to any provisional conclusions. We should also strive to reassess our provisional conclusions as the evidence changes.
We should try to run different models at the same time; and we should always pay attention to feedback loops, including fact-checking, while being wary of those who tell us what we want to hear. Our understanding of the world will feed back into the world; and the world will change a little as a result of our changing beliefs.
My worldview should be seen as a framework for thinking about the world rather than as a set of conclusions. The distinction is important. I am much more interested in having a methodology to find out about the world than a set of findings that stand beyond criticism and need bodyguards when they begin to fail.
Just as my values contain something of my worldview, we can also see that my worldview contains something of my values. You can see that I appreciate caution and pragmatism, rather than big one-size fits all explanations yielded with utter certainty by people who want to smash the actually existing institutions of liberal democracy.
There are deep links between suspending judgement (part of my worldview) and appreciating liberal democracy and a market-based economy (the basis of my values). If the world is very big and very complicated while our brains are very small, shouldn’t we devolve most everyday decisions down to individuals and families rather than telling others how to live their lives?
Tolerance for other people’s decisions is the secret sauce that binds scepticism to liberalism. How can one ever have enough information to intervene in someone else’s life, as long as their decisions don’t have a significant negative impact on others? Those of us who develop this attitude will tend to err against bigotry, generalising, nationalism, nativism or tribalised politics, all of which seek to reduce the complexity of reality and narrow the choices available to other people.
Please note that my defence of tolerance isn’t an argument for relativism. Everyone has the right to their own values and their own worldview. However, some worldviews (particularly those which treasure feedback loops) will connect better with reality than others (particularly those that deploy conspiracy theories as the bodyguards to ideas that are failing to provide a connection to reality).
My essay on pragmatism discusses the need for reformists to focus on the biggest problems in society first. That is clearly climate change today. I develop the case for green liberalism here. It should be obvious to careful readers that this conclusion is a result of combining my values with my worldview. We should use humanity’s most effective tool (a market economy tempered by the institutions of liberal democracy) to tackle our most pressing issue (climate change). How can we create market-based incentives to tackle greenhouse gases?
Of course, it can be difficult to fit green liberalism grounded in institutionalism into our actually existing politics. I develop a case for becoming a floating voter here, which is a way of squaring my theoretical framework with the messiness of the world.
Do it yourself
I would urge you all to go for a long walk and slowly mull over your own values and your worldview. What is the difference? When you have thought about it, sit down with a blank piece of paper and try to divide them into different columns. Of course, the cut will never be perfect, as you will see with my own example. Even so, it is worth trying. It is worth stressing that this is a difficult exercise, so you shouldn’t expect to be able to get a satisfying answer in just one afternoon.
Before you begin, let me give you one word of caution about intuition. We have seen many times on this blog that intuition can lead you astray when it comes to developing your worldview (for example, here and here). You should always distrust any intuitive beliefs about current affairs allegedly being scripted by a shadowy elite. This speculation runs with the grain of how our brains think, even if it falls short of providing good results.
However, distrusting intuition is much less true when it comes to your values. The philosopher Michael Sandel teaches us that we should trust our innate moral judgments when it comes to the limits of markets. So, for example, if you find the idea of a marketplace for bodily organs disgusting, that is a valid conclusion.
I would love to know the results of your own reflections on how to separate your values from your worldview. I strongly suspect that the best answers will include feedback loops as a core part of the section on worldviews. Appreciating feedback is likely to make us less likely to want to deploy conspiratorial thinking as the bodyguard of a failing idea. The comments are open. See you next week!
Further Reading
What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Market by Michael J. Sandel
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