Helllllllllloooooooo Otterites!

Yep. Robert is alive and well, contrary to what it would seem given how often I post lately. then again, I told you that was going to be the case. Wasn’t going to lie and say I’d have something every single week. Just wasn’t going to happen.

Marty has thrown down the gauntlet, so to speak with his quote about ideologies.

Great quote. Love it. For me the money is here:

“Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas…”

I don’t think you can repeat that too often. Ideology is not the product of thought. It’s a habit or ritual for formulas. In other words, it’s living by sloganeering, meaningless mantras and sound bites designed to make you feel, think and act in a certain way.

Ideologies are basically the formal version of propaganda.

On the one hand, an Ism is not bad in and of itself. It’s a way to gather certain thoughts and ideas under a single umbrella so that they can be reasoned into a cohesive whole. A unity of purpose and meaning.

As always, where we go wrong is when we skip the reasoning into the cohesive whole and head straight to the unity part. Unity here almost always requires, nay DEMANDS, purity of thought and action for those who subscribe to the particular ism. I don’t care what particular ism we’re talking about either. Believers in any cause can go too far once they abandon reason for purity. That purity almost always ends up having only a passing resemblance to the original Ism.

We have seen it in political movements, social movements and even in various faith movements. My own Catholic faith has seen it result in schisms, anti-popes and various crises. I believe we have weathered them as well as we have because we tend to go back to reason, especially Aquinas. It tends to draw you back from the extreme to re-examine things in a new light. Not to abandon what has gone before, but rather to progress in unity with that past.

As Martin pointed out, we at Snakes and Otters are big on thought and action going hand in hand. They must. Too often the ideology becomes all about the action. That gives rise to the purity movement and that’s when thought is abandoned. When thought is abandoned, you’re unable to evaluate things under changing conditions. In fact, changing conditions are often ignored and even denigrated as unimportant or even non-existent.

Actions taken without sufficient forethought are likely to be brutal at worst and only somewhat neutral at best most of the time. Why? Because of unintended consequences. Ideologues rush in where angels fear to tread. The standard of the day is, “What could it possibly hurt?” This question is usually followed by the most telling question of all, “How was I supposed to know?”

How were you supposed to know? How????

If you had taken a moment to think things through, the logical, almost inevitable consequences would have been obvious and you could have done something different.

Purity precludes this. Nothing matter except the ideology and a blind, unwavering adherence to it, the cost be damned. Ideologies destroy the thing that gives birth to them when left to run amok, unchecked. It’s as inevitable as the rising of the sun in the East.

Note that I did not name a single ideology, movement or idea in this piece. Fill in your own boogeyman ideology and I’m sure you’ll find that it fits.

Now turn it on its head and fill in the ideology you give your allegiance to. Does it fit too? If so, you need to run from it as fast as you can.

Think, man. THINK! Before all is lost. It may already be too late.