What is the ideology?
The politics it is an aspect of life in common that, despite affecting all of us in our lives, seems to be widely repudiated. The linking of the political sphere to the exercise of elites that are in charge of synthesizing the chaotic "popular will" through a kind of alchemy Election is something that, to say the least, generates disdain for its ineffectiveness when it comes to introducing satisfactory changes for the entire population in the economic and social spheres. Social.
However, there are still few people who question classical participatory democracy, abiding by the logic of the lesser evil. It is, apparently, a position of centers, which does not fall into extremism. One might wonder, however, what is the psychological nature of the political center, and to what extent it is differentiated from alternative ways of thinking. To do this, we would first have to address the concept of ideology.
What is the ideology?
Classically the ideology as a system of fundamental ideas that define a mode of political, religious, cultural, identity, etc. thought. own of a person or community. That is to say, in a certain way the accent is placed on the timeless and on the degree to which these ideas define and are defined by the person or group that holds them.
From the point of view of cognition it is very comfortable to understand the concept of ideology as something immutable. Fixed and watertight categories do not lead to contradiction, they promote conservative ways of thinking: being anarchist implies not going to vote in general elections, being on the right implies defending flexibility labor. “I do not vote because I am an anarchist, I am an anarchist because I do not vote. This is practically tautological reasoning with perfectly greased internal gears.
The complexity of our conception of the world
Without a doubt, Believing in a priori-fixed ideologies is comfortable. However, this belief has the problem of being totally unreal. To think that people have concepts, category systems and "thought circuits" fixed in time or even "Proper to our being" is a form of dualism that goes against everything we know about psychology and neuroscience. Today we know that any idea is actually the fruit of a continuously changing network of neural relationships, even in old age. There are no fixed ways of seeing reality, and therefore even less there are ways of thinking “typical of…” if we take into account that they are constantly changing.
Similarly, the definitions about political ideologies typical of academic literature do not exist apart from a reader who will internalize these ideas in the light of their past and present experiences and will also guide their conclusions according to their objectives and interests.
Between ideas, prejudices and wills
Any idea exists because certain associations between ideas and lower-level perceptions silence other possible associations of ideas. What happens is that there are associations of ideas within a process of competition and convergence of various fragments of knowledge, biological impulses, subjective evaluations and conclusions of deliberate thought, as Joaquín points out M. Fuster in Cerebro y Libertad (2014). This happens continuously, even while we sleep. As a consequence, our Thought is not rigidly guided by a single integrating principle such as "being on the right" or "being a pacifist", etc.
The term "ideology" refers only to those general guidelines that define ways of thinking, but at the same time it implies an inevitable reductionism when studying something, comparing it with other things, etc. It is useful to talk about ideologies, but it must be borne in mind that what happens in reality is something else: unique and unrepeatable thoughts, deeply original even despite being based on previous experiences, memories and knowledge, guided only in part by thought deliberate.
This conclusion has serious implications. Consciously giving up our ability to reduce politics to hermetic and autonomous philosophical systems proposed "from above" implies thinking of politics as a function that is not typical of central organs of decision. It implies, after all, saying goodbye to ideological monism, to manual politics.