Unpacking apparent value differences into factual questions will however typically require asking a lot of difficult questions.
Why do you value authority? Why do you value diversity? Why do you value equality? Why do you value faith? Why do you value modesty? Why do you value radicality? Why do you value solidarity? Why do you value tradition? Why do you…
Quite a lot of the time people will be completely unequipped to answer these kind of questions themselves. The answer to “why does a single particular person adopt this belief” is in the median case nothing more than “because they were raised with it” or “because it came with the ideology they adopted”. People aren’t actually intrinsically thoroughly rational in their decisions.
People are regardless also not born with any of these kind of ideological stances. If they turn out to be widespread anyway, it won’t be arbitrary: it will be mostly because they are social technologies that people, collectively speaking, adopt for some particular material reasons; not because they would be intrinsic values that they’re biologically wired to uphold.
And that’s a fun general feature of social technologies: they will work even if you don’t know why they work, even if nobody knows why they work, even if you don’t believe in them working, even if you don’t recognize their existence — this is the fundamental difference that separates technology from magic
— but as long as we don’t know why something works, we also will not understand why, when or how will it fail. Perhaps we won’t even realize that some particular undesirable phenomenon even is a side effect of a particular social technology! And sometimes some beliefs aren’t social technologies at all, but rather outright mind-viruses living rent-free in our brains…
All the more reason to work on understanding each other, understanding where we stand, understanding how we got here, understanding how we operate.
