Ideology

From The SpiritWiki

An Ideology is an organized set of excuses that provide justification for the actions of individuals or groups. Ideologies are never neutral, rationale, or empirically based but instead are based on the requirements of whatever actions they justify. For example, the oppression and exploitation of women in underpaid (or unpaid) labor, their exclusion from significant decision making power, their economic exploitation, and the application of violence in all it's forms, requires a significant and interrelated set of justifications ranging from "naturally based" ideologies like the notion that women are the "weaker" sex, to "divine based" ideologies which emphasize God's will or the cosmic order of things.

Continued faith in ideological explanations of the world often requires significant mental and emotional repressions in order to avoid a simple awareness of fact. That is, it takes a lot of physical energy devoted to the repression of empathy and awareness to justify and then act out the violent stoning of a female, or to allow a single parent female to exist in poverty and despair despite a world of obscene wealth. Nevertheless, in order that we might benefit from the world "as it is," and an in order to avoid the responsibility of changing things, we adopt ideologies even in the face of obvious and contradictory evidence.

This world has many examples of ideologies developed to account for and explain the callousness and inhumanity of The System, the outrageous inequalities, and the unending violence and suffering which occurs on this planet. Some examples from the "top level" of philosophical justification include Liberalism, Communism, and Darwinism. Ideology is also, of course, present in the religious and spiritual systems of this world.