Ideological Thinking in Politics

Ideological Thinking in Politics

When I was a boy, I can remember my mother, who was a Republican, arguing politics with my grandfather, who was a Democrat.

They just seemed to go around and around.

It was a running debate. Nothing got solved.

Put simply, an ideology is a belief.
One can make an argument for it, but it is still a belief. It is outside the scope of science. There will always be dispute about it. If an idea is scientific, then it is testable, and with time, almost everybody will agree with it. Galileo concluded that the earth revolved around the sun, and during his time, a lot of people were not very thrilled with that idea. But with time, more and more evidence supported the conclusion, Today no reasonable person would disagree with it.

The words communism, socialism, and capitalism, describe ideologies. The ideologies in the world today are very large in number with a lot of variations. Some people are very attached to their ideologies to the point where they think that if everyone accepted them, it would solve their problems. That kind of thinking is flawed. Ideological thinkers cannot be objective and often distort the truth.

This is extremely common today. I know someone (an American) who was in the Viet Nam war. He murdered people, including civilians and Americans, and was involved in unspeakable atrocities, by his own admission. He still says today that it was justified because: "We had to stop communism at all cost." His destructive behavior was based on this terribly erroneous assumption.

People continue to try to solve social system problems with ideologies and it doesn't work, and is oftentimes damaging. We are entitled to have beliefs. But we need to recognize them as beliefs.

People within the political parties who select the candidates today are usually ideological thinkers. They select candidates that think like they do. The general public can recognize this. With proper electoral reform, I believe that they will see a clear difference between the problem solving personality and the ideological personality and be very pleased to be given this choice.

Ideological thinkers can be extremely deceptive. They may be wonderful orators. They

may articulate in beautiful words their lofty and noble ideologies. Often when I hear this I get very uncomfortable, because I sense that it is merely a veneer that conceals a faulty understanding of the system, its mechanics, flaws, and solutions.

When an ideological thinker is asked how he will solve a problem, he is usually evasive, glib, overly general, and superficial. Perhaps he should be in sales, but not in a position of executive responsibility. Sadly, he can often hypnotize a crowd with his orations. Fortunately, he can be exposed with the proper strategy.

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