Mainstream WeeklyWhen I recently finished reading Leor Zmigrod’s book: The Ideological Brain: How Rigid Beliefs Harm our Minds & Bodies and Why it Matters, the book helped me to see the harms I have incurred myself due to my blind adherence to an ideology. I have already realised the damages ideologies do both to the society and the individuals who hold the ideologies, and discarded all kinds of ideologies long ago. But it is Smigrod’s book that helped me to see the pernicious damages the ideologies do to their blind supporters’ brains.
In the chapter titled "Ideological Possession" Smigrod says: "From fascism and communism to spiritual evangelism, ideological groups offer absolute and utopian answers to social troubles, strict rules for behaviour and an ingroup mentality through dedicated practices and symbols. Such features exist across the spectrum of ideological persuasions...When an ideology demands rigid and ritualistic thinking, it demands that we bias our vision, twist our gnawing doubts into silence, surrender our subjectivities and creative possibilities. When an ideology demands rigid and ritualistic thinking, it demands that we become someone else. Someone less singular and unique, less curious, less free."
The above sentences vividly delineates my own self in my late teens and early twenties when I was a staunch Marxist extremist. As a passionate Marxist-Leninist, I have had "absolute and utopian answers" to every problem of the world. But the real problem is the problems of the world can never be solved with the ideologies we believe in. My ideological dogmatism made me believe that the Marxian slogan ’from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’ is the solution to the economic and social inequalities of the human-world. But how the slogan works in the real world I could never really understand and as my vision was biased by the ideology, my doubts were automatically twisted into silence.
In this process of silencing our doubts about the practicality of the ideologies we believe in, the role of our own brains and the scientific explanation to it I learnt only now, through Smigrod’s book: "Believing passionately in a rigid doctrine is a process that spills into our neurons, flowing into our bodies... Totalizing ideologies shape the brain as a whole, not simply the brain when it is confronted with political propositions or debates. Science is beginning to reveal that the profound reverberations of ideologies can be observed in the brain even when we are not engaging with politics at all. Since our brains learn to embody indoctrination in deep and insidious ways, the social rituals we learn to enact can become the biological realities of our minds and bodies. There is therefore a danger that when an individual is immersed in rigid ideologies, it is not only their political opinions and moral tastes that are being sculpted