Ideological Evolution - a Preface

The -most effective ideologies- are those that are psychologically effective for the most people.  Ideologies, thus, have a kind of Evolution - a survival of the fittest for human programming if you will.

It's important to rehearse first "what ideology is for".  Ideology is, essentially, the unproved background theory in which judgements regarding specific events and issues are couched.  Thus, for instance, religions are ideologies - providing a background of lore, vocabulary and value by which religious persons couch all of their thoughts about the world.  Scientism is also an ideology - the unproved assumptions in scientism being the epistemological foundational issues that remain undecided in all of science.  Obviously Marxism, Capitalism, Imperialism and Socialism are also ideologies.  If we inquire as to the source of the existence of these ideologies we find that in many cases they were invented or promulgated by a single source (e.g. Marx, Christ, Weber, etc.) and/or evolved from prior ideologies due to historical and cultural trends, generally themselves reactions to other ideologies.

As with biological evolution, ideological evolution can't be vacuous - that is, there must be some specific aspects of an ideology that make some survive and others fail in the context of the events described.  Survival is to be measured by adoption and rejection rates in the overall population.  This will also be a clue for predicting ideological evolution - which ideologies will survive, etc.  - and thus will constitute a science with testable results.  Indeed, I would say, a science that has been in practice though non-explicitly for centuries, viz the science of political rhetoric.

Research into this will be essentially a survey of ideologies of the past and present as well as the historical events that dominated the changes of those ideological systems over time - as well as to see what survived and what did not.

Thus, e.g., Capitalism evolved from earlier Mercantilism and Imperialism whereas, e.g. Marxism came into existence as a reaction to the then dominant imperialism and Capitalism.  So also Catholicism evolved out of a melange of early christian sects and the then-dominant Roman Empirialism, and Protestantism came into existence as a reaction to that Catholicism.  So we have essentially an evolutionary system - competition, mutation, survival of the fittest.

Some lesser ideologies remain in the world, e.g., "politically correct speech" or "theosophy".  These "lesser ideologies" don't -necessarily- present entire world-views (though some do) but rather are parasitic upon or grow in a niche where the more dominant world-views fail to take hold (in the human mind).  These lesser ideologies include everything from simple "internet memes" to large-scale political ideologies that are simply not adopted by large numbers of people (Libertarianism, e.g.).

One clue, of course, to the differentiation between surviving and non-surviving ideologies is therefore to take a look at relative adoption and rejection rates and the changes over time.

And here we would have to look at case studies which I intend to do in follow-up blog posts.

But we can provide a preliminary overview of some criteria:

a) Exposure - an ideology, in order to spread, needs access to people's minds.  A mind can not adopt an ideology of which it is simply not aware, and this often requires MEDIA and ADVERTISING in the current sense, or some kind of socialization system.  Sometimes these socialization systems are built-in (like Amway - to get ahead in the Amway system, you MUST invite others).  Other ideologies are spread using modern advertising techniques ("buy american") or ("buy organic") - finding and appealing to an audience based on their media preferences, etc.   In addition to raw exposure, many ideologies never achieve widespread acceptance because their audience is essentially limited, either because the ideology itself is limiting (racial purity ideologies, for instance, limit themselves in some ways to the races for which they were designed.  Given that the world is multi-racial, they are essentially limited, therefore, and as opposed to trans-racial ideologies.)

b) Appeal - an ideology must make a psychological appeal to the intended adopters.  Ideologies that are less appealing or less obviously appealing have a tendency to not achieve high adoption rates.  Thus an ideology of, say, pure self-denial, will have a relatively lower adoption rate than, say, an ideology of pure hedonism simply because "there's nothing in it" for the adopter.  Ideologies that subtly postpone the reward for the work required have a tendency, it seems, to do very well, likely.  That is, carrots help.

c) Fear - ideologies that appeal to fears have another sort of appeal.  Fear of death, fear of loneliness, etc.  Ideologies that promise assuage those fears have an appeal.  Some ideologies can get away with having no other appeal than the alleviation of fears.

d) Ease of Adoption.  Some ideologies are -hard to understand- or require too much investment on the part of the potential adoptee.  Other ideologies are simple-to-understand and require -at least seemingly- little investment on the part of the potential adoptee.

e) Competition.  Some ideologies are dangerous to other ideologies - either because they threaten to take their ideological potential adoptees or because they sometimes literally, destroy the adoptees of another ideology.  Romain Imperialism (e.g.) was essentially opposed to early Christianity and sought to literally destroy it because it realized that the Roman Ideology based on the God-hood of the Emperor was called into question by the rising christian ideology.  Thus the Romans killed christians by the thousands.  Protestantism took entire countries of dedicated catholics and removed them from their dominant ideology (with relatively less force required).  Ideologies that have a built-in ability to defend from competition have a better chance of surviving (viz, Capitalism and Imperialism have excellent competition prevention systems, whereas, e.g., Southern Baptist Christianity versus, say, the Southwide Baptist Fellowship where little obvious reason to choose one over the other is given and no obvious way to prevent ideological shift among its membership other than brand loyalty).

d) Momentum.  Ideologies are sometimes as fundamental as language itself.  Thus adoption of a different ideology itself requires energy even if the original ideology is itself in some ways unsuitable (e.g. being to costly or not making enough sense, etc.).  Thus an ideology can survive on bulk and momentum - and ideologies that capitalize on this by, e.g., promoting early education in the ideology and procreation among its members, (Mormonism, Catholicism, Capitalism, Lenninism, etc.), have an edge over ideologies that require adoption from outside (e.g. the Shakers).  Similarly ideologies with large followings have literal physical force to apply in competition versus other ideologies with smaller followings if necessary.