To end on some good news. Let's try to talk about a couple of really nice things about ideologies. My personal favorite is that they embrace contradiction. People are fine having completely contradictory beliefs because you can only use one at a time anyway, right? So I can believe something now that is good for me right now and then tomorrow I can espouse the opposite position, and that's okay. As long as nobody brings that up explicitly, we all of us do this. Now, the nice thing about that is that you don't have to get rid of the belief you don't like in order to introduce the belief you would like people to have. Because people will be just find holding onto their old belief and taking your in. Eventually maybe the two will war it out in some way, but you don't have to rip out the old in order to introduce the new because ideologies are really good at contradictions.

Ideologies already have a lot of different ways of thinking about things. So that what you can do then is look at the options and try to hitch your message to a more beneficial one or one that seems like it might be easier to change.

So for example, if you're looking at well women are bad at math, that might be one that seems really intimidating and difficult to change. However, you'll find that a lot of people who have that belief may also have the belief that women who are good at math are not as cute as women who are bad at math. If they have that belief, that might be a lot easier to change. Notice that these are inherently contradictory. If women as a group are bad at math then presumably there are no women to be un-cute and good at math. But that's not a problem. We can hold contradictory beliefs.

If we look around and say okay, this one about the cuteness, that's much easier to change because I know some really hot female math geeks. I can just trot those out and hitch my wagon to that ideology and see if I can alter it in the ways that I want it to go rather than struggling with this other one that maybe is a bit less flexible.

Ideologies also adhere to social structures. If you can make it trendy to believe what you want people to believe and you can make it outdated to believe this other thing you don't want people to believe, then you can sit back and you're done. Because people will start circulating your beliefs so that they can show that they're trendy.

People are constantly changing beliefs, rewriting them, arguing about them, negotiating them, having conflict about them. Everything is mobile. Even though you can look at the world and say oh gosh, people believe all these things I don't want them to believe, because they're constantly moving you always have another shot at trying to get in on that conversation.