Man can only find himself by losing himself to something greater. What he loses himself to, he does not know intimately; for the strong pull that the thing has on Man's soul comes precisely from its mysterious and inscrutable nature. He does not know the ultimate consequences of his own loss, and he does not understand the world he is creating for his fellow human beings.
Around 100 years ago, humanity lost itself to something so powerful that the consequences surpassed anything thought possible until that moment in history. In its darkest moment, society set out to destroy human nature itself. This it achieved by depriving human beings of their rights to dignity and freedom; by emptying humans of their spontaneity and individuality; by destroying the social bonds that unite them, so that even in company they were lonely; and finally, by mass-producing human corpses with unprecedented efficiency.
General wisdom would say that those things to which Man loses himself to are simply ideas. After all, human beings can only find themselves, understand their place and their significance in the world, by adhering to a worldview (Weltanschauung) — a set of ideas which provide meaning, orientation, and direction for action. Around 100 years ago, the two worldviews that led to the darkest moment in human history can be summarized as follows:
History is the struggle of classes [Marxism].
History is the struggle of races [Racism].
These two ideas, very different in their specific content but similar in form, were so powerful that gave gave rise to states which took them as official doctrine; these are so-called totalitarian states, and they were responsible for that systematic attempt at eradicating the human being as we know it. My goal is not to go into detail about the specific content of Marxism and Racism; there are an infinite number of worldviews throughout human history, but there are only a few who created the destruction of the human being as we have seen in the XX-th century. Instead, what I want is to dive into the form that they share: they are the same type of worldview, which we call an ideology.
As Arendt said, an ideology is what its name suggests: the logic of an idea. The logic of an idea is simply the movement from one idea to the next according to a given set of rules. Just like objects move according to the laws of physics, ideas develop according to their own laws. Just like the laws of physics allow us to predict the trajectory or history of the objects from past to future, the laws of ideas allow us to predict the trajectory or history of an idea from its beginning until its final form. Although ideology shares with physics a lawful structure, it differs in that the movement of an idea appears as an organic development, advancing through different stages until their final stage by some inherent "genetic" property. Nothing else from the outside is needed for the development of an idea: ideology is a closed and total system.
When ideology is applied to the actual world, it immediately states the following: human history advances towards its final stage according to laws. Man, who cannot find himself in this world, who cannot make sense of it nor see meaning in it, is gifted with a solid footing: history is known, its final stage is known and the laws are known; in this sense, ideology fulfills a role similar to that of religion. Ideology then commands the next step, which is action: Man's role is to contribute to this movement of history, to realise the ideology in the world. It is time to join the struggle, to accept your place in this natural movement, to overthrow the capitalist class, to destroy the inferior race, to dehumanise and eradicate the other who is in the way of history fulfilling itself.
Ideology cannot incorporate new knowledge, and it cannot learn from its mistakes. It cannot learn, because it cannot think at all: thinking always implies freedom. Ideology is algorithmic, it is software-like — every step is compelled, constrained, and ruled by it, and thus predictable. A sign that a group of people has installed such software is that their sentences are almost identical, which is one of the saddest things one can witness. A human being who is authentic and expresses themselves freely almost always produces original sentences, even if they are about well known topics.
Every free person, every non-ideological person is thus seen as an immediate threat to ideology. Human freedom is the natural enemy of ideology, since the latter always requires manipulation and control of reality in order to realise its vision of the world. For this reason, ideology is fundamentally anti-human, striking directly at that freedom, spontaneity and creativity that characterizes human beings and which are their right by nature. A totalitarian state is formed when an ideology has grown enough to take hold of state machinery. The state inherits the total character of ideology, and can now use its power in order to control and eradicate human nature for ideological purposes.
Form always takes precedence over content in ideology. Ideology is anti-human in itself, independently of the specific content of the idea. Choose your category by which to divide humanity: class, race, gender, sex, ethnicity, national, immigrant, oppressor. Choose even the category of love! An ideology of love will automatically exclude the people who think freely about love, who think that the ideology might not be the final word about love, and who do not want to participate in its particular vision of a world of love. An ideology of love will hate even those that are not against love, but who are against the ideological brand of it; an ideology of tolerance will dehumanise even the tolerant simply because they refuse to install the software; and an ideology of open-mindedness is necessarily close-minded. Thus, according to ideology, there is nothing wrong with hate, intolerance or close-mindedness; these words have no meaning whatsoever, and are only tools to manipulate reality in order to realise the ideological vision of the world. Notions like morality and search for truth are totally disregarded by ideology, which can only exist in worldviews that are open and incomplete, who leave space for a better understanding of the world around them, who engage in exploration and tolerate some level of difference.
Modern society is in near perfect conditions for ideological capture. In an era of social, political and economic uncertainty, the worldviews that provided humans with orientation and meaning in this world are breaking down. In parallel, technology presents humans with so many different versions of reality that they cannot help but be confused about the world that they live in. As a result, humans are again installing ideological software, which allows them to escape into the fictional world of ideology where everything makes sense on the basis of a single and total premise. By now, it has infected all sides of the political spectrum. Loneliness, the degradation of rational speech, critical thinking, tolerance and humanity are the necessary products of a society that lives in the conditions that we live.
An ideology does not need to kill anyone to destroy society. The only thing that ideology needs to do, and this it does consistently and efficiently, is to erode and destroy all human bonds, so that loneliness reigns supreme. How many friendships do you know have been broken over politics and social issues? How many family ties? Were they broken over issues of immigration, gender identity, racism? Perhaps feminism, men vs. women? Again, choose your category, who cares? The division will keep going regardless, always increasing in depth and breadth, and it will keep going because of the anti-human movement that ideology is.
I do not believe that this downward process can be stopped before it has made significant damage to humanity, not before it reaches some sort of critical point. Ideology is such a powerful software, and societal conditions are so inviting to it, that I cannot fathom a way to simply remove it without creating a vacuum. Ideology has made it possible to believe that human nature, from which human rights are brought forth, can be manipulated and eventually destroyed; that human rights can be stripped away, because they are just abstractions, inventions of the human mind, social constructions. Even in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is not clear at all where these rights come from; are they just imagined like ideology claims? I do not think so. Human rights come from human nature itself, which gives each human its uniqueness, creativity, spontaneity and freedom. Since human nature is part of nature as a whole, human rights are an expression of nature itself. I believe that such an enlarged worldview of human rights, a narrative that grounds human rights in something deeper than humanity itself, could fill the void exploited by ideology.
The eyes of a free human being always have a light of their own. In love this light has the intensity of a star, and the black hole of ideology is where it is extinguished. But Man always falls better in ideology than he falls in love.