Stalin and Ideology Thro' Robert Trivers' Self Deception

I have said it many times and here I am saying it again - Self Deception theory put forth by brilliant Robert Trivers is grossly unrecognized for our own peril. 

My hope is that someday Robert Trivers' becomes as recognized (and acted upon) as Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's works. 

Once you start looking at people's motivations and actions through the lens of self-deception (and learn to look through many lenses, not just one); we might be able to eliminate most of evil at its roots even before it starts growing. 

Richard Hanania connects the dots between Stalin's ideology with Trivers work: 

Humans are good at justifying their own self-interest and emotional needs through moral or ideological arguments. Robert Trivers famously showed how this could be evolutionary adaptive, arguing that those who need to deceive others can be most effective if they deceive themselves first. In this formulation, it is difficult to pin down exactly what it means to “truly” believe something. One way to approach the question of what drives a political leader is to ask the degree to which self-interest, in the form of the acquisition of fame, money, or power, converges with ideological justifications.

One should not rule out power-seeking or sadism as an explanation for behavior simply because a historian does not find a document in which a despot says, “I am now going to kill people because I need to stay in power and it makes me feel good.” Human nature almost precludes even the possibility of finding such evidence. In contrast, when purported ideological considerations, along with some resulting behavior traced to them, do not appear to serve one’s own interests, we are probably on stronger ground in saying that an individual is actually motivated by his ideals.

From this perspective, Stalin throughout the 1930s maximized his own power while objectively weakening the Soviet Union and the cause of international communism abroad. This should have been clearly visible given what he did to the Bolshevik party and the Soviet military and intelligence services, unless one was motivated to be blind to this fact. Convincing himself that he was acting in accordance with Marxist principles only served to assuage any guilt Stalin might otherwise have felt and make him a more ruthless and effective mass murderer.

[---]

While I would argue that in later years Stalin came to be driven more by sadism and the lust for power, the forced collectivization of agriculture, perhaps his greatest crime, can be directly traced to communist ideology and a dream of a better world. Communism impoverished and immiserated the masses in the Soviet Union just as it has everywhere else it has been tried, even under leaders more squeamish than Stalin. What divides political leaders who do good and those who do evil is ultimately not simply a matter of intentions, as Stalin’s worst acts derived from his idealism and concern for his fellow man. While a combination of altruism and correct ideas can move the world forward, dreamers who are wrong on the facts are more dangerous than the worst cynics. We undervalue the importance of truth relative to good intentions at our peril.