Ideology — A Crime Against the Soul

Back off and let imagination have its free play

As a young man, I had an awful lot of answers. I found them in many different places. I spent a spell as a born-again Christian where the Bible had all the answers. I was a student of philosophy where it seemed the existentialists had all the answers. Then it was my progressive politics. Then back-to-the-land simplicity, organic lifestyle, energy healing. Each time, I knew I had found it. The right way. The one way. The only way.

Ah, how life educates you.

What broke me open was a shattering of ideology itself. I was introduced to the work of C.G. Jung through Robert Bly. I attended a couple of conferences in which I learned, as a fairly young man, that there are alternatives to the way my father was a man. I tried my hand at poetry, and I read a breathtaking book by James Hillman called Re-Visioning Psychology. I have never been the same since.

Reading the book by Hillman was a seminal point in my life. Hillman insisted on the primacy of the imagination, and whether he was right or not was irrelevant; I found it thrilling. All of a sudden, life lit up. Until that time, I had spent my young intellectual energy attempting to pour the facts of life into an ideological can — the way my dad taught me. There was a right way to do things and a wrong way to do them, in his mind. I never accepted that his categories of right and wrong were accurate (many sons have to challenge their fathers on that), but I did accept that there are categories of right and wrong at all — and that they apply to everything. This produced a lens for looking at the world. Until Hillman, it never occurred to me that this might be inaccurate.

Predictably, Hillman’s force of imagination took on the Cartesian worldview and what he calls Christianism. But it also took on scientism, an equally powerful way of imagining the world. He shows how all of these frameworks try to force the variety of human experience into the boxes the framework creates, rather than treating human experience — including, especially, the experience of imagination — as fundamental and allowing a framework to develop that reflects it. The human being, it turns out, has options. You can take a framework you have adopted a priori and apply it to the breadth of human experience, or you can accept that human experience is infinitely variable and interesting, cut nothing out, and attempt to understand yourself from that place.

Ideology is the a priori adoption of a framework for understanding experience. The question is how to place an experience within the ideological framework. Is it right or wrong? Does it belong here or there? For men like me who grew up with a father like mine, this ideological habit is very easy to adopt. I watched this habit in action. Simply by living it, and without intention, my father taught it to me. Combine that with church and school and football coaches, and it appears that ideology is the only way. I believed that the key is to pick the right ideological framework, and then stuff the enormous variety of my life experience into it — or write it off as meaningless.

Ideology is the practice of having a theory of life in which everything has an answer instead of a question. It is a box for the soul, and it tends to prevent real social connections. Why? Because the mind is always looking to put something in its box. The ideological person isn’t curious; he is simply a bully imposing his will. The soul cannot individuate in such a person, even if it is his own ideology, because there is no room for growth. The practice is to translate events into the ideological view, thereby never really seeing them for what they are. The more complete the ideology, the more totalitarian the effect is upon the soul, and the more narrow the person’s view becomes.

There are truths in ideologies. If there weren’t, we would never give them allegiance. But they are only creations of the imagination, just like the rest of the images that emerge from our minds. In this way, they hold no more or less moral truth than any other, no matter how hard we cling to it. But because we invest ego so strongly in an ideology, we raise it to a level superior to all others. As such, the ideology becomes the figurative hill on which we are willing to die. We defend it with all that we have. We live its code. We add moral certainty to it. We will not bend. Yet in so doing, we energize its opposite with the power of the shadow.

In reality, an ideological viewpoint is just a perspective, no matter the content of the ideology. Right-wing, left-wing, racist, puritan, holistic, hippy… it doesn’t matter. Each is just as ideological as the other. The ideology is the box into which lived experience is placed, partly to control it and partly to draw sensibility from it. Ideology is nothing but an imagined framework for understanding life experience, which can be useful until experience doesn’t fit.

The effect of rejecting ideology as the correct or moral way forces a relativization of the ego. The ego, after all, is the part of us that adheres to the ideology. Ideological thought is ego-based thought, and as the ego is interested in controlling its own kingdom, it is not interested in the Dionysian anarchy of soul images. It fits them into the places where it feels it has them under control. From a psychological perspective, this is one of the primary sources of neuroses. The soul will still express itself, and that expression just might be in a disease.

To the extent that ideology boxes up imagination, it kills the soul. For the soul to flourish, imagination must be allowed to run wild. It must be free. Daydreams come. Night dreams come. Wild ideas. Great conversations that are open and creative flourish in the imagination. Art and engineering and athletics all prosper. Life becomes an enchanting experience.

Ideology is a crime against the soul. It limits the imagination, and it limits our lives. Our political concerns, social concerns, and especially our moral concerns all limit us if understood ideologically, and all of them can become beautiful areas of creativity if we can overcome the chains that bind us. The good news is that those chains are in our own minds — it is in our power to change them.

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Anthony Signorelli

Ideas, insights, and imagination to help you live better in a worsening world.

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