Munger argues that ideology ranks among the most dangerous cognitive distorters, illustrating with Noam Chomsky — “possibly the greatest semanticist who ever lived” — who cannot accept the obvious Darwinian explanation for the human language instinct because “if he concedes this particular Darwinian point, the implications threaten his leftist ideology. So he naturally has his conclusion affected by his ideological bias.” If ideology can corrupt the cognition of a genius, “imagine what it does to people like you and me.”
The mechanism is self-reinforcing: “If you get a lot of heavy ideology young — and then you start expressing it — you are really locking your brain into a very unfortunate pattern.” Expression pounds ideas in harder than reasoning can extract them, creating a ratchet effect. Munger contrasts this with Buffett, who “observed this as a kid” watching his “very heavy ideologue” father and “decided that ideology was dangerous and that he was going to stay a long way away from it. And he has throughout his whole life. That has enormously helped the accuracy of his cognition.”
The prescription is not to avoid all conviction, but to avoid the “holy construct” certainty: “It’s all right to think that, on balance, you suspect that civilization is better if it lowers the minimum wage or raises it. Either position is OK. But being totally sure on issues like that with a strong, violent ideology, in my opinion, turns you into a lousy thinker.” This connects to First conclusions become nearly permanent — the brain resists its own updates — ideology is essentially a first conclusion that has been expressed and reinforced until it becomes immovable. The antidote is the multidisciplinary approach from A latticework of mental models beats isolated facts for real understanding, which forces you to cross jurisdictional boundaries that ideology wants to wall off.