Leor Zmigrod

We possess beliefs, yes, but we can also become possessed by them. With powerful measurement tools, it is now possible to see the consequences of ideological rigidity all the way down to human perception, cognition, physiology, and even neural processes. Our bodies are not impervious to the ideologies that surround us: what we believe is reflected in our biology.

Unlike the impressions left in sand, ideological imprints are difficult to erase. Our most recent scientific discoveries illustrate that human brains soak up ideological convictions with vigor and thirst.

Ideologies offer absolutist descriptions of the world and accompanying prescriptions for how we ought to think, act, and interact with others. Ideologies legislate what is permissible and what is forbidden. Unlike culture—which can celebrate eccentricities and reinterpretations—in ideology, nonconformity is intolerable and total alignment is essential. When deviation from the rules leads to severe punishment and ostracism, we have moved away from culture and into ideology.

Even if an ideology seems righteous, ethical, vital, urgent, or beautiful, I believe it should be examined closely. We can study an ideology’s structure, its genesis and effects, what it alters in adherents’ minds. We can scrutinize what, in a mind, an ideology fractures or silences; which biological and mental processes an ideology distorts. Does the ideology impose a tight grip on believers’ brains? Or does it let them wonder and wander freely?

Every worldview can be practiced extremely and dogmatically. Every kind of cultural narrative used to explain the world can tip into a totalizing ideology. As a result, inquiring into what an ideology urges us to think is insufficient; we need to analyze how it makes us think too. When an ideology demands rigid and ritualistic thinking, it demands that we bias our vision, twist our gnawing doubts into silence, surrender our subjectivities and creative possibilities. When an ideology demands rigid and ritualistic thinking, it demands that we become someone else. Someone less singular and unique, less curious, less free.

. I believe that we can judge an ideology based on what believing in it does to human bodies and brains; on whether being a passionate believer narrows our movements, lassoes our flexibility, restricts our responses, or triggers us to commit violence. If we have less scope for
plasticity and change and less direct access to our sensations, we are at risk of dehumanizing ourselves and others. We become less sensitive, less elastic, less authentic. If we see reality through an ideological lens, we end up avoiding the richness of existence in favor of a more reduced, stereotyped experience.

Believing passionately in a rigid doctrine is a process that spills into our neurons, flowing into our bodies. Ideologies are not mere envelopes for our lives; they enter our skins, our skulls, our nerve cells. Totalizing ideologies shape the brain as a whole, not simply the brain when it is confronted with political propositions or debates

Cognitive rigidity translates into ideological rigidity.

Metaphors are powerful because they have the flavor of explanations. But an analogy taken too literally becomes a source of error and confusion. In fact, a metaphor mistaken for the truth is worse than an error: it reinforces certain superstitions and faulty excuses. A wrong metaphor discounts behavior that ought to be scrutinized and changed.

Metaphors We Live By, “metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities.

As the linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote in their influential study of metaphors, Metaphors We Live By, “metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies.”