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On Ideology
The Marvel universe is modernity’s most famous media platform for exploring archetypal heroism. The latest instalment, WandaVision, is Marvel’s most recent expression of the dangers of ideology.
An ideology is a fixed set of ideas — a rigid, dogmatic knowledge structure — for viewing the world. An ideologue views the world through an ideology, a prism of axioms, and discards any fact or theory that isn’t compatible with it. An ideologue is presented with new information that contradicts their ideology and doesn’t change their mind — changing one’s mind to accommodate anomaly is the antidote to ideology. Ideologies are, therefore, by definition very bad ways of understanding the world.
It is for this reason that the devil in Judeo-Christian theology represents unbridled rationality —a synonym for ideology. Unbridled rationality is problematic because the amount of facts that exist tends towards infinity as time progresses, so any amount of facts one knows in the present is increasingly dwarfed by the ever-approaching-infinite unknown (or the actual pre-cosmogonic initial condition, who is identical with God). Relying on one’s current repository of facts and theories to navigate one’s way in the world and opposing the necessity for exploring the unknown becomes an increasingly poor…
