How people adopt political ideology

We tend to live in a very oversimplified version of life, ignoring the complexity associated with it. This crave of oversimplification of things leads to high scale demand of so many cheap ideas out there, benign from outside but hollow from inside. One of them is to categorize things into pure virtuous or pure evil. It has to be either of them and that is what happens when people adopt political ideology. People use fancy words like ‘left’ and ‘right’ while depicting their position on the political spectrum having hardly any knowledge of what these terms actually mean.

Now coming to the the question that we asked earlier, which is “how people adopt political ideology?” Let’s start answering this question by understanding “political ideology”. Political ideology is basically some set of rules or principles upon which society and associated governmental authority should function. Each individual is free to adopt his/her political ideology. It all started from the seating arrangement of political advisors in French National Assembly, post French revolution. But you see, it’s a nice fancy word for youth to fight on social media. To be honest, no such clear left and right exists in India. We are just too much fond of fighting over things that we don’t even clearly understand. If you want to know more about them, you can read different books out there. We need to understand that, there isn’t any perfect political ideology, but people remain so self absorbed that they just ignore this fact. You are free to present your biases, in fact it’s better, but there is no point stupidly falling for these ideas. You also need to take it’s limitations into consideration. You must have observed, after a certain point of time, the political debates just stops being logical, it’s the blind-spot turn for the conversation, where the the whole point of the conversation becomes forcing biases on one another.

But why does it even happen at the first place? There are two reasons for that. First, the data intake before choosing a political ideology is too less. What I mean by that is ,the amount of information consumption is much less than enough. Most people stick to a political leaning because, that was their first impression of politics. Now for such people, I would like to say that your first impression was probably a very raw understanding of how politics works. Hence stop giving so much priority to first impressions. Open up yourself to change. If you still continue to hold on to that first impression, then probably you are being intellectually dishonest to yourself. And also the sources you rely on for information are themselves biased, and why shouldn’t they? Sticking to a particular political leaning attracts a particular audience and they add that bias to the facts to hold on to that audience, be it mainstream media, print media or social media. If you have a shallow understanding of politics( which most people have, they just don’t want to agree upon it) and you come across any of these things, you are most likely to adopt their political bias. Now if anyone in your vicinity doesn’t agree upon your views, this creates a conflict in your mind and you collect evidences to prove yourself right. This process strengthens your bias and you are officially a flag bearer of your favourite orator.

Second, even after you have chosen your political leaning, people chose to filter out the information consumption according to their biases, knowingly or unknowingly. What I mean by that is, if you fall towards right in political spectrum, you chose to view contents which somehow or the other favors the conservative political ideology, because that continues to give food to your growing bias, and hence we feel very comfortable about it. But the truth is you are only seeing one side of the coin. Try to consume information of opposite political ideology, no matter how stupid it sounds, but atleast you are being fair to your biases.

Well, nowhere in this article did I say that, having biases is wrong because it isn’t. You are a human and you will hold some biases. But, for your biases to not become toxic, you should allow yourself to learn. When you hold yourself to a particular thought process, you are almost married to it, which means you aren’t allowing yourself to see it’s pros and cons. In this whole article, I tried to stick to the topic and hence I focused on conveying my idea rather than just telling facts. For facts, you can always refer to quality books and sources, that is the sole purpose of their existence. And also I preferred to use variables, I didn’t project my own political leaning as I myself also going through the process of refinement of ideas. So try to not corrupt your intake of information. A fair decision is made when all the possibility and probability are taken into account.