How to Create an Ideology

Let's say you and I coach a football team. Over the years, you have developed a number of ideas about football, ideas like "Try to avoid third-and-10 by gaining at least a couple of yards on your first two downs. Don't give up big plays on defense. Fundamentals like tackling and blocking are the most crucial aspects of the game." These ideas are rules-of-thumb that have worked out pretty well in the past. Of course, we have been flexible applying them: if they give us the long ball on first down, we'll take it. If an outstanding, fast receiver comes along who can't block, well, we figure we have ten other guys who can, and his big gains more than make up for his weakness.

But we are not happy with the situation. We have heard that many theorists of football strategy find our approach an incoherent muddle, and tell us what we really need is a sound, rationally based football ideology. So, to answer a question suggested by our friend Marris*, how can we go about turning our grab bag of ideas into an ideology?

To begin with, we will stop considering these to be rules of thumb, and cease to balance what following them might achieve against other, competing goods (as Aristotle would refer to them, the "admitted goods"). Instead, we must turn them into "truths," which cannot possibly be in any tension with other such "truths," as though we were doing geometry exercises instead of playing football. To prudentially take anything other than these truths into consideration, to balance them against anything, we declare to be both irrational and immoral. So if the other team keeps gaining four yards by running the ball up the middle every time, and thus scores on every possession, we don't even consider paying a little less attention to stopping big plays and a little more to runs up the middle. No, that would be a "fatal weakening of principle with the base alloy of 'prudential' heresy." Let them score every time! At least we stuck to our principles! Should the defense pile up at the line of scrimmage, knowing we always go for short gains on first and second down, so what? We don't want to become prudential heretics and throw a long pass on first-and-10.

Next, it will be very helpful, in order to set up our truths in some sort of hierarchy, and shut out rules of thumb that might compete with them, to declare some idea to be a self-evident axiom, or a principle of historical necessity, or something of the sort. It really doesn't matter what we choose, so long as it has an air of plausibility about it. Let's try "Success in football should only come if earned by hard work." This allows us to name our ideology: Effortarianism! Then, we will pretend to "derive" the ideas we already had from this "axiom," e.g., "Blocking and tackling should always take precedence over speed and size, since they stem from hard work." When picking players, we will choose hard-working, lame midgets over lazy, 6'5" speedsters. Principle, you know!

A really helpful idea will be to label anyone who doesn't buy into our system, in a way that makes it clear they are morally inferior to those of us who are Effortarians. Words like "reactionary" or "natural-talentist" might do the trick here. "Oh, you 'natural-talentists'! You think just because you keep beating us 150-0 that makes you right! I suppose you think that if you steal and get away with it, that makes it OK, too?"

A good way to keep up the spirits of those sold on our ideology, despite our repeated drubbings, is to point to the aforementioned historical necessity, and proclaim that these defeats are only potholes on the road to our ultimate triumph. Sure, over the last ten years, since we turned our rules-of-thumb into an ideology, we are 0-125, and have lost by an average of 138 points, but don't despair: The Old Order of football is dead or moribund; and the reactionary attempts to run a modern football team by various throwbacks to the Old Order are doomed to total failure (just not right yet). And if anyone uses some of our ideas, but prudentially, so that they occasionally win a game, we deride them as "sell-outs," and perhaps give them a pejorative label, such as "inside-the-20-yard-line Effortarians" (since they sometimes actually get the ball inside the other team's 20).

And if we are really high on the rarefied air of our ideology, we may even attempt a maneuver such as declaring that anyone who ever so much as touches a football, but does not accept our system, is guilty of self-contradiction: "He risked giving up a big play to stop his opponent on 3rd-and-1: he's irrational!"

Marris, we may never win a game by doing the above, but I bet you we could get a few thousand rabid fans on the Internet, who will donate to us to help "spread the glorious ideas of Effortarianism." What do you say? Up for some easy cash?

* He whose comments are exalted and become like unto posts themselves.