The Spiritual Side of Ideologies (part I): two problems and one massive blind spot

What Twitter feels like in my brain (from Smashing Magazine)

Sometimes certain words get into the stream of thinking, news making, and posting so consistently that it seems as if you hear it every minute of your day. The global pandemic has caused me to feel nauseous when reading sentences that include “unprecedented” or “the new normal.” And now, as our country has, once again, reckoned with its racist history, I am hearing a word flying around with little consideration. The word is “ideology.” Here’s how it’s been used in just the past 2 hours on Twitter (as I’m writing this):

Racist ideology

Pro-slavery ideology

Prepackaged ideology

Terf Ideology

Communist ideology

Radical ideology

Ideology of law enforcement

And that’s just in the last couple of hours.

An ideology is a system of ideas that is based in a kind of theory. It means an organized set of beliefs — the multiplication of ideas off of one big idea — a sort of family of dogmas that, while all interrelated, also are distinct and different like siblings or cousins in a family: they are different, but they share DNA. Ideologies are real and can be dangerous. Some of the ideologies mentioned in my list above…