The Dangers of Ideologies

Source: Reuters/MSNBC

If there is one word that could be used to sum up machines building prejudices, it is ideology. I don’t want to make the argument in this phrase sound like a sweeping judgmental statement like the ones particularly condemning religion in our times, but yes, a part of that is a part of it. This does not necessarily mean that ideology is a bad thing. All I want to say here is that it can be counterproductive at times, and particularly dangerous when it interferes with logical and mathematical reasoning, especially when it fuels and/or builds prejudices.

Ideology is important to most people. It is actually important and indispensable to most people. I am not against having that sort of a broad outlook to life and existence. It can prove healthy, yet unhealthy at the same time, as a lot of things which are meant to be healthy-for-the-mind go. It all comes down to application but the problem is that people choose to take their beliefs a bit too far to be able to reconcile them with the contradictory facts or reason that they may encounter. While it would be incorrect and absolutist of anyone to assert that ideology is the root of all evil, which it clearly is not as evil predates all such products of evil mistaken to be its sources, it can still create quite a bit of trouble.

While the problem is almost natural to occur, I somehow find it disturbing to how it divides people. Still I would not act like an ideologue by asserting that ideologies are the absolute source of evil, even though I know that there is a part of me that is irrational and that also believes in an ideology. However, if you are reasonable, it does not really matter. It is this being reasonable part which I want to see, because being unreasonable is simply the greatest problem under discussion in this context.

Yes, indeed, it is ideology that prevents you from accepting what others have to offer you in good reason. But not everyone is like that, though not everyone is like that at one point of time, and not unlike that at another. We tend to forget, or not know about it as if we never had it in mind at all and many give in to the domination of ideology if latter is the case. But in any case and at any rate, this surely causes a lot of trouble and un-productivity, unnecessary arguments, killed time that could rather be spent masturbating and illegible and meaningless ink stains on wasted paper that could have actually been a thousand trees injecting oxygen into our suffocating airspace.

Does it require any mention that in more of uncivilized and relatively irrational societies, ideologies can potentially and do cause a lot of bloodshed, in which those people indulge who hardly understand what they believe in? And in civilized and almost rational societies, in which scholars would conveniently contradict their own principles as long as they do not contradict with the mutated baton of bigotry passed on from one ideological fallacy to the other. The greatest thing is that it goes unnoticed by you when you are at it, only spotted by ideologues waiting for something to pounce on or by idiots like the writer of these lines, using it for writing lines like these.

Not every ideology may be reasonable but reason is employed to create each and every one. Not every ideology will bring happiness because somehow life has its own mechanism to run things that probably no such idea can encompass. You need a way to live your life, something to believe in before you give in to despair, but beware lest you become so blindly loyal to your ideology that you start bringing harm to your fellow beings and not even realize when a word of sense and reason is being spoken to you. I call it the bureaucratization of reason.

However, let us not spoil our evening with bitter realism and let us pretend that our ideologies steer us to a happy ending, as in Giaochinno Rossini‘s La Gazza Ladra, the composer whose 220th birthday is today. Because there is a good chance that ideology will defeat reason again.