Ideology fails

Here's why

I have spent a good chunk of my life around ideological people. People who want the world to be better, who want a better life for the average citizen or certain minority groups, and who have no issue with shouting for change from the rooftops. I have most certainly been such a person too.

I think I can now see why ideology fails.

The nineties was a time when we believed that the conscious mind was literally God. It was a time when we believed that if you could simply banish negative thinking from your life, you would inevitably become all-powerful. It was the time of Tony Robbins.

Thirty years and heaps of scientific studies on thinking, language and behaviour later, I believe the real picture is getting clearer.

Thinking and especially language are actually not huge drivers of human behaviour. The brain appears not to use language to think with, meaning you can’t simply programme it with positive affirmations and then sit back and await miracles. The nervous system has huge power to control behaviour, mostly subliminally. The brain tends towards simple rituals of daily behaviour to give it a sense of security and calm, especially as it gets older.

So why are so many people still transfixed by a belief in ideology? Why do so many people believe that we can change the world by thinking differently?

Simple, if you ask me. It’s because we’re primates and much of our brain is based around status acquisition and signalling.

Being able to go online and demonstrate to others what a great person I am - obviously not in such words - but more subtly with images of what I eat and the political causes I support, will give me a hit of reward chemicals. I’ve demonstrated higher status within my perceived peer group and am thus a “better person.” Other people will like me more, so the primate part of my brain believes. I will be able to attract a better mate, or just any mate, so the primate part of my brain believes.

This is absolutely bog standard primate behaviour. Go to any heavily-forested tropical area and you will find all manner of apes doing essentially the self-same thing, all day long. I might believe that I’m being motivated by my altruistic love for mankind. But the primate part of my brain knows that such ideas are nonsense and actually just another aspect of the posturing. I’m caught up in an addictive behaviour that repeatedly feeds me with little hits of certain brain chemicals and the biochemical basis of my activities is to be found in the grooming and status acquisitional behaviours of our evolutionary ancestors.

If you are a person still enmeshed in ideological activities and you find your brain now saying… OMG but we can’t just leave the world as it is, that’s terrible and awfully depressing, then there’s a reason for that too. Your brain has just perceived a threat to its regular supply of feelgood chemicals. It’s actually not because you want the best for mankind. Stop posturing.

To sum up, I believe that it is fair to say that ideology is in reality very unlikely to solve the issues that our world has. One reason for that is that pretty much no one actually does ideology with that intention anyway. The other is that thinking and language are actually very weak as drivers of human behaviour, especially when they butt up against nervous system mediated defences which simply have ascendency because that is how our brain evolved.

Perhaps this piece sounds a bit of a downer. Actually, I don’t believe that it is. I think that it is useful to understand what isn’t going to work, such that we can get down to looking at what might.