The wrong-belief theory of differences is the implicit idea that differences in worldviews come from wrong beliefs (and being "propagandized" about those beliefs, or something similar), and that one's worldview is correct (or at least more correct) compared to those wrong beliefs.
It seems to me that this is the default meta-view on worldviews. This might seem like a sweeping claim, and in some sense it is, but from what I've seen, the average person's view on why other people believe in certain things isn't more sophisticated than saying that those people are stupid, or they are corrupt, or they have been propagandized into wrong beliefs since an early age, or they are being possessed by demons, that sort of stuff. There is hardly any attempt to understand other worldviews in an earnest, good-faith manner.
Here are some examples:
§1. A progressivist sees people who oppose mass-migration, and concludes that they are racist and ignorant for such a stance. They do not examine further what "racism" is, where it comes from, or whether they are additional reasons for opposing mass-migration, some of which might be legitimate.
§2. A left-wing person sees the rise of the red-pill movement and concludes that men are being propagandized towards being more misogynistic, without thinking of the struggles they might be going through, some of the good points that the red-pill makes, and some of the blind spots that the left-wing has with regards to masculinity and power.
§3. Christians see the rise of liberalism and all the debauchery that comes from it, and conclude that they are straying from the path, and that their corrupted minds can no longer see the Truth of God. In this, they are missing all of the abuses of power that religions and the traditional family could impose onto the individual, and putting all the blame on other side.
Conversely, liberals see the return to religion and conclude that people are being brainwashed towards being more conservative. They cannot think of any legitimate reason for why people might turn back to religions.
§4. People who defend the system see those who oppose enforced social trends such as lockdowns and vaccines as believers in conspiracy theories. This prevents them from seeing the healthier skepticism that some people might have against those practices, an in general, the reluctance to follow the demands of the system.
§5. Older people see how young people tend to be increasingly disillusioned with the system, particularly in the realm of economics and ecology, and continually engage in critiques of that system, while looking for ways to live outside it. Those older people then conclude that younger people are being "propagandized" (again, that word) into anti-capitalist beliefs, or that they are being lazy and do not want to engage in the workforce, without examining why someone might hold anti-system beliefs in the first place.
What might not be clear from my examples is that both the worldviews/people I am using as examples, and the things that are being critiqued, have some validity to them. There are indeed people who are plain racist, there are people who are indeed propagandized by the internet to believe in all sorts of destructive beliefs, (against women, or even against the system at large), there are indeed many toxic excesses of liberalism and atheism, and there are indeed many crazy conspiracy theories going around.
Likewise, there are valid reasons for opposing mass-migration, and there is a glaring privilege that many progressivists have with regards to their views. There are good points that the red-pill makes that the left-wing isn't willing to acknowledge. There are very good reasons for societies to move away from traditional religions, or conversely, back towards them. And there are good reasons for young people wanting to drop out of the system.
The problem with the wrong-belief theory of differences is that it completely closes the door to any examination whatsoever. Instead of thinking about why a person might hold this or that belief, that implicit idea immediately labels them as stupid, crazy or brainwashed. A good heuristic to check how well you understand another worldview, and thus the world at large, is if your default stance on them lies in the realm of "they are just stupid/ignorant/crazy", or whether you can give some legitimate arguments for their beliefs.
Scientists are literally unable to understand why people believe in religion or spiritual matters. Leftists are unable to understand the right-wing, and vice-versa. Feminists are unable to understand the red-pill, and vice-versa. Older people are unable to understand younger people, and vice-versa. Those are huge barriers in creating cohesion in a large society, they are not merely peripheral issues with regards to abstract problems, they are hard divisions that make any form of dialogue across social classes and cultural groups largely impossible. Most conversations happen within (roughly) the same set of people, in which case the conversation is pointless because it happens within an echo chamber, which means that this problem doesn't correct itself over time, but tends to grow worse.
There are many things in practice which lead to people adopting different worldviews, too many to discuss here. One major factor of course is that we are very different from one another. It is easy to see that physically, people can be incredibly different from one another. Some are very tall, some are short. Some are physically strong, some are overweight, some are skinny. Some people have a dark skin, some have a white skin, and others have something different altogether. On and on. People are different physically.
Yet we do not make the same leap when it comes to people's minds and experiences. And yet, the differences at those levels are much more pronounced, which means it really should be our default intuition. Unfortunately, our default intuition tends to tell us that if someone has very different views than us, then they must be wrong in one manner or the other. The idea that different worldviews come about through being informed by different experiences is not our default assumption about others.
I am not trying to say here that every worldview is equally valid. Not at all. Some worldviews are held by incredibly insensitive and loveless people. Some worldviews are plain deluded, and reinforce ideas and assumptions that resist being examined. Other worldviews are held by people who pretend to be full of virtues, but in reality do not embody any of them. This is why I talk so much against privilege and the basic reality of social classes, the middle class in particular is really keen on presenting itself as the nicer of the three, because it doesn't have to deal with all of the harsh difficulties of the lower class, most of which are not polite to bring up, nor does it have to deal with all of the brutal power games that the upper class has to engage in.
But what is important to understand that it is very difficult for a worldview to be completely wrong. The problem when beliefs are examined outside of the circumstances that bring them about is that it makes them very easy to judge. Judgment in many ways is the enemy to understanding. When we judge ourselves or others, we are focusing on negative labels of them, instead of trying to truly see them as people. This is why online discussions are so much more dehumanizing than real life conversations, and why social media has made politics so much more polarized.
When we cast a judgment on a belief or a worldview, we are not merely dismissing a set of ideas, we are also dismissing the people who are trying to articulate what they see in the world, and are trying to defend themselves in many ways. Most people are not very interested in politics, they mainly want to live their own life, and happen to be part of a heavily political society in which having opinions about various abstract and complex issues is (sort of) necessary to navigate real life. This is why most people do not have very coherent views on politics, but this doesn't mean that we should simply ignore them, because in doing so we are ignoring the lives of real people.
Domination has many manifestations, and the modern version of it is intellectual dismissal. The fact that we can have discussions with one another instead of waging physical conflict over one another is an improvement in many ways, but this doesn't mean that we have somehow become a sane and accommodating society. The worldviews that suffer most in modern times, the age of technological power and 'rationality', 1 are those which are illegible and more receptive, both qualities which we could qualify as 'feminine'. Rationality in that regard is a very cold, closed-off, and quite domineering male worldview. Besides the fact that it is completely blind to its own assumptions, a much more down-to-earth critique of rationality lies in its inability to interact with people on a human-to-human level, instead reducing everyone to mere beliefs, and every situation to mere abstract ideas.
Try to suggest that a society which allows people to live more slowly would benefit everyone, and you will be met with the sneer of the industrialist which tells you that this is not a good way to optimize wealth and profits, and that this would lose to any competitive business. Try to suggest that we are ritualistic beings who need to be part of and contribute to something greater than just ourselves in order to live well, and you will be met with the sneer of the scientist, who sees no valid (legible) reason to believe in the superstitions (what they consider to be superstitions) of the past.
Perhaps the greatest loss of this climate of intellectual defense and attack is that it has prevented people from simply being open with one another, and having our lives revolve around human qualities. The global cultural war has made everyone into a sort of soldier, and just like the veterans returning from the Vietnam War were unable to fit back and relax into regular life, so too are we unable in many ways to simply converse with one another, from a shared understanding built on love instead of intellectual understanding.
The way out of this mess is not through some elaborate meta-theory of worldviews and perspectives, the direction that so-called 'meta-modernism' so often takes, it is instead to ground ourselves back in the simple but very important compassion for the other person, and the context that unifies us both. What is the point of elaborate theories if they're not grounded in love? What is the point of understanding other points of view better if it doesn't bring more love in the world? 2 What is the point of creating a social order that doesn't put love at its center? At the end of the day, people matter more than ideas. 3
1 I put 'rationality' in scarce quotes, because there is something quite irrational at the foundation of so-called 'rationality', in that it ignores all sorts of personal experiences in favor of an ideal of consistency and mind-legibility.
2 Ever noticed how all of the discussions surrounding autism haven't really made people more compassionate about people diagnosed with it? It might have put more buzzwords surrounding autism into the general discourse, such as 'neurodivergence', or 'stim', or 'ADHD', but has it really made people, and the system as a whole, more compassionate to the internal life of other people? I don't think so. Intellectual understanding is one thing, but heartfelt, personal day-to-day compassion is another thing altogether. This is not just about autism obviously, this applies to the experience of any real outsider, which is to say, someone who has a genuinely different qualitative experience than the average zombie or automaton of the system who lives life on auto-pilot, such as: young children, sensitive men, women who haven't been turned into insane men, artists, genuine mystics, and any oddball who simply doesn't fit in the system. Discrimination hasn't disappeared, it has only become more subtle.
3 And the fact that so-called 'open-mindedness' has become another criterion alongside which people can police others for being 'bad' or not is a testament of how easy it is for us to forget this simple truth.
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2026-09-28