The Price of Invasive Politicization Part 2

Authoritarian belief systems offer unique challenges many of us have not considered.

Something I’ll repeat near the end of this article: The version of heaven offered by political belief systems is the illusion of Utopia.

I’d like to remind everyone of Freud’s words featured in my previous article on the subject:

“If you wish to expel religion from our European civilization you can only do it through another system of doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the psychological characteristics of religion, the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought in self-defence.”

Some writers/thinkers recently have said/written that some political pundits are actually subscribing to a religion. Linguist and author, John McWhorter specifically calls what he (and many others) call “wokeness” a religion.

One problem with that assertion could lie in the challenge of defining religion or at least in getting folks to agree on a definition.

Regardless, when we recognize that political beliefs are sometimes approached with behavior equivalent to religious fervor, things come into focus.

Whether we call a belief system a religion or say that it functions like a religion, the fact remains that some belief systems can capture some people’s personalities and minds, can replace their judgment with doctrine.

This is a problem particularly with those systems that are exceptionally prescriptive, rigid, intolerant, and filled with sanctimony that justifies and disguises built in bigotry,

We used to call this fundamentalism. We used to call fundamentalists zealots. In many contexts, we can use the terms “zealot” and “ideologue” interchangeably.

By this reasoning and measure, we can determine that a system does not need to be religious to be fundamentalist.

Fundamentalist orthodoxies can be used by their proponents to confuse you into inaction or seduce you into destructive action.

Authoritarian doctrines can rob you of your ability to think independently.

Ideologies, particularly authoritarian ideologies, are inherently reductive.

These authoritarian dogmas seem to meet a human need to have reality described and morality defined; however, they lack certain components that religion provides.

For all of our valid criticisms of religion, especially in cases in which we see religious behavior at its worst, religions tend to have ideas and practices aimed at individual growth.

Religious and spiritual systems offer virtues that political belief systems don’t tend to feature. Religious and spiritual approaches can offer you pursuits other than power – This is something unthinkable to authoritarian political perspectives.

Religion is all too often used by people and governments to gain and maintain power and to justify barbaric acts.

Yet, we can ask Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao whether we need religion for state sponsored brutality.

Politics has taken on the same reality-describing and morality-defining importance now less occupied by religion in western countries. Anyone who claims otherwise is wrong, dead wrong, and that’s a problem.

The version of heaven offered by political belief systems is the illusion of Utopia.

We are challenged to recognize authoritarianism within these systems and to identify the alluring and seductive nature of reductive systems.

Your mind is your own, and no one else holds more responsibility for protecting it than you.