Ideologues (part 2): The Mentally Weak
Ideologues are mentally weak, unfit individuals. Through years and years of relying primarily, if not solely on third-party discovery, determinations, perspectives and achieved modal paths of thinking — that is, the beliefs and/or knowledge they’ve acquired either directly from their cultures, communities, institutions and revered individuals, or beliefs they’ve manufactured based on information dispensed to them by these authorities, their minds have atrophied and their abilities for objective observation and consideration, adaptive reasoning, conceptual development and organization, and situational assessment and response have been greatly diminished.
The minds of ideologues (authoritarian-thinkers) are very, very weak and fragile…
As a result of severe mental atrophy, ideologues are easily triggered by any and everything that doesn’t agree, or fit with and conform to their beliefs, their senses of authority (that is, their status beliefs), or the information, ideas and statuses they take on authority.
This makes ideologues wildly aggressive and combative towards anyone or anything that they perceive to devalue their authority, by failure to recognize and yield to the systems of authority they’re linked into.
In short, ideologues attempt to solve all problems with various forms of authority — control, manipulation, punishment, (perceived) justice, etc, etc, etc…
So for instance, if you were to ask an ideologue to share their thoughts on the best way to fix their nation, their home or even their personal relationships with others, their responses will ALWAYS sum to and/or be reductively expressed as “We [and/or I] just need more authority.” or “People just need to recognize my authority and/or the authority of things I either recognize as, or take on authority.”
With respect to nation: “If we just put the right people in charge, and then punish all out-groupers and/or people who don’t yield to the authority of my group and/or ideology, then all of our country’s problems will be solved.”
With respect to home: “My house, my rules; you will respect my authority!”
With respect to personal relationships: “I don’t like them because they think they’re better than me!” — Translation: “This person doesn’t yield to or edify my authority to my liking! The tension between us is their fault, because they should be working harder to make me feel special and superior to them!”
There are thousands of different ways to express this principle…
The ideologue both sees and approaches information and reality by way of authority first.
Individual Observer: “What are we observing?”
Ideologue: “Well this person says this, and that belief system says that, and this book says this, etc, etc, etc.” — Translation: “I and what I am saying should be viewed as authority, because I speak in support of authority.”
What’s more is that ideologues process information and reality according to LABELS, and not CONCEPTS. By this I mean, they typically sort all perceived values into overarching conceptual categories that sum to authoritative or moralistic dichotomies — e.g., “good or bad/evil, right or wrong, punishment or reward, deserving or underserving, win or lose, etc…”
Because the ideologue’s mind isn’t practiced in exploring or unpacking the mechanism within the concepts behind the words they use, they attempt to rationalize everything by simply assigning labels to things (by way of jargon and branding devices).
So for instance, a wannabe “conservative” ideologue will use terms/labels like Marxist, liberal, social justice warrior, snowflake, and scores and scores of other buzzwords (labels), however, if you ask them to unpack and explain the concepts behind the labels they use, they won’t have a single original thought that doesn’t sum to: “Here’s why we’re the good guys and here’s why they’re bad.”
Ideologues (authoritarian-thinkers) cannot process concepts at or on deep levels. At best, they only know jargon related to complex concepts, topics and issues, and can marginally navigate systems related to said jargon in a broadly cursory, at best, mediocre fashion. They cannot critically analyze or build onto concepts at a fundamental level.
Again, ideologues are mentally weak and fragile people. Years of not thinking for themselves or dynamically engaging the thought process has caused their minds to atrophy, and become sluggish and brittle.
We’ll touch more on this subject in part 3 “Ideologues, Glory and Blame”.