The Ideological Brain

The most effective ideologies embolden followers to desire their own domination. With the tools of science we have a fresh way to distinguish ideologies that distort our cognitive capacities from worldviews that bring us closer to our sensation of reality. We can quantify the harm, the injury inflicted by rigid ideologies in new ways.

This is why we need scientific approaches to inform ideology critique. So far, our methods for determining which ideologies are moral and which are immoral have relied on roughly five kinds of sources. First, historical analyses of past sufferings. Second, philosophical or theological pronouncements on universal abstract moral categories and whether these are being frustrated or fulfilled. Third, cultural comparisons of existing ideologies. The fourth method uses aggregate social and economic reports to study the population and test who fares better or worse and why.

The new science of the ideological brain should vitalize any philosophy that tries to define itself as malleable and oppositional to dogma. By reckoning with how easily a philosophy (or even a science) can become an ideology, we can inquire into how philosophies of freedom can avoid slipping into ideological systems.

I think that an ideology of freedom is an oxymoron, a self-contradiction. There can be a philosophy of freedom—a vision for what autonomy looks like—but the moment it becomes a systematic doctrine with an irrefutable pseudoscientific and essentialist logic, it ceases to be about freedom.

It is only outside of an ideological framework that individuals possess the freedom to imagine and reimagine themselves over and over again. As the writer and civil rights advocate James Baldwin observed, “the artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.” This is why ideological systems fear (and sometimes incarcerate) transgressive artists, poets, and critical thinkers—they question the ideology’s utopian answers and erode the doctrine’s monopoly on truth.

Sometimes it is assumed that engaging in a classically creative pursuit—such as art, performance, craft, music, or literature—is equivalent to engaging with it creatively. But a creativity that matters psychologically is a creativity that changes forms and destabilizes, that breaks or stretches the convention, that experiments with inversions and reversals. This is our personal capacity to think
otherwise—“otherwise as in, a firm embrace of the unknowable,” in the words of writer Lola Olufemi. Embodying this flexibility is not necessarily constrained to the traditional arts; it is possible to rehearse a multiperspectival and adaptive creativity in every domain. The key is to switch between modes of thought and expression rather than rehash formulas. Even the person enclosed by repression and constraint can break routines and bend them in novel and liberating directions.

How we think can matter more than what we think, and by uncoupling the substance and structure of ideological thinking we can figure out when the content of the beliefs matters too.

Protective characteristics, such as cognitive flexibility or emotional regulation or a resilient familial context, may suppress or weaken the effects of risk factors.

Flexibility is a fragile thing. Even in the freest of places, ideological ways of thinking are terrifyingly alluring. Our predictive brains seek out rules, logics, and habits that can organize ourselves and others. It is a constant struggle to shun black-and-white thinking in favor of seeing all the shades of gray. Remaining in the liminal spaces of ambiguity is an arduous Sisyphean task—always demanding our attention, rarely allowing moments of rest.

In conditions of oppression, tyranny, or precarity, these demands can be even higher. If ideological restrictions are strong and powerful, it can be exceptionally difficult to resist, mentally or publicly.

Can we harness forms of political engagement and activism that do not inevitably fall into black-and-white ideologies? Can we offer citizens the tools to know when an ideology merits critique and when a philosophy can be a source of creativity and resistance to injustices?