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[Music] you in this episode we're gonna explore what is ideology this is something that I've thought about and studied for a very long time it's part of what I call epistemology or theory of knowledge how do we know anything how do you know that what you know is actually true and from really over a decade of studying this and pondering this topic for a long time my all my ideas are starting to kind of get crystallized and congealed and distilled and really all of it one day I remember I was just thinking like well what what's the essence of what I'm trying to understand here with epistemology and it was just so simple and so clear and it just came to me as just one simple rule for life and here's the rule the number one rule for life especially when it comes to knowledge and it's this don't be ideological that's it that's the whole rule don't be ideological but of course the trick is unpacking that because there's so much to that simple little statement but it's an extremely powerful statement and because I myself have thought about this for a long time contemplated this and I have many examples in my own mind that I can bring forth of why this is true and what it really means for me I can just tell myself don't be ideological in some situation and then that opens me up to then overcoming a certain obstacle that I might have had and so I want to help you to be able to do that too so we're gonna spend quite a bit of detail here going into detail unpacking this statement so that then you can just once you understand what it really means and why it means what it means then you can just have those four words and you could say them to yourself for the rest of your life and it's gonna be a very liberating for you and you will be shocked at where it takes you in life if you're just able to follow through on this one simple maxim of don't be ideological you might seem like it's common sense but but man this isn't this is not common sense this is very tricky and subtle stuff so be careful this is really worth your time to to explore with me deeply ideology is the greatest obstacle to truth seeking whether that be within science for example or within spirituality as well ideology corrupts both science and spirituality and of course it corrupts things like politics and other important aspects of our lives but what really is ideology ideology is a cohesive set of beliefs it's a web of beliefs about how reality works and not only is it that but there's a stubborn intellectual attachment that comes with this set of beliefs and not only that but almost always this set of beliefs says something about how you think things ought to be for example how people ought to behave who they should have sex with or who they shouldn't have sex with or how government should be structured or how school should be taught or etc etc this this component of it is called normativity normativity means that not only is this something that I hold certain and then I'm stubbornly attached to as a belief system but that I believe that it's true for everybody else as well and they're therefore I believe that everyone has to subscribe to my belief system and behave according to it and that's how ideologues think that's one of the functions we'll get in a little more detail later about the function of ideology but that's one of its main functions is to actually be normative to give prescriptions for behavior and so what happens is that the mind and really what we're talking about here is we're talking about operations of the mind the mind think of the mind like a machine and this machine has certain dynamics and patterns and tendencies and so with ideology we're talking about deep characteristics of the human mind and what the human mind tends to do is it tends to get hung up on certain pet theories that it has and then it robotic Li defends those theories oftentimes for the rest of its life leading to all sorts of tragic and problematic results which we'll get into so other synonyms that you could use for ideology that I've used in the past and I'll probably use in the future is belief Dogma paradigm worldview perspective now these aren't all identical so you can have a belief but it doesn't necessarily constitute an ideology per se dogma is is a pretty good synonym for ideology paradigm paradigm has its own quirks and I've talked about paradigms in the past I have entire episodes talking about paradigms and that's a very important notion and a paradigm is not necessarily an ideology although often times they are so like they're synonyms but they're not perfect synonyms so we use these words sometimes interchangeably but sometimes to to talk about some specific important facet of how our minds work and how how they get stuck with various belief systems now one very important misconception that we need to clear up right off the bat is this misconception that people think that ideology is something that's exclusive to religion and that's not at all the case you can definitely be ideological in a secular or rational or even scientific manner and this is a big trap that many people fall into is they think that well because I'm not religious leo therefore this whole topic of idea ecology doesn't apply to me man I'm with you leo I'm all against the religious people but of course you don't realize that in doing that in believing that you're now becoming an ideologue just like them scientists academics skeptics they can all be ideological and you know I hate to name names because I seem to name these these same people over and over again but you know what I kind of have to because they're just part of our culture they're part of our intellectual culture right now and people follow these these scientists academics and skeptics and intellectuals and they easily get seduced into their ideologies without realizing their ideologies because they seem secular for example Richard Dawkins is ideological youtuber by the name of Stefan Molyneux Bill Maher Christopher Hitchens Michael Shermer a big ideological skeptic which is really really ironic because his whole shtick his is is fighting basically ideologies without realizing of course that skepticism in the way that he's doing it is is a very serious ideological problem Sam Harris to various degrees is ideological TYT The Young Turks a liberal politics show on YouTube that's very popular Jordan Peterson also to various degrees is ideological and so forth so the important thing that you understand though is as i mentioning these names first of all don't take it personally and this is not an attack on these people I'm pointing out deeper structures of the mind just using these people because many folks are familiar with them and also because I need examples which are not religion it's very easy for me to come up here and to cite various religious nut cases who are ideological or some you know far right-wing political hacks and talk-show hosts who are obviously super ideological like it's very easy for me to cite those people and in a sense it's easy for you like it's kind of like obvious to most people it's obvious that those are ideological though to many many of their fans it's not obvious but it's the more subtler forms of ideology that are really important to point out here ideology comes in degrees and in flavors and it can be very subtle it doesn't necessarily have to be just completely over-the-top raving ideological lunatic like Alex Jones right it doesn't always mean that so if you're objecting to some of these names that I've mentioned you might say Oh leo but these people you know sam harris he's not an ideologue and all this you know that it enough well that's because you have to understand that I'm not saying that sam harris is a copy of Alex Jones he's not an ideologue in a sense of Alex Jones he's an ideologue in in a in a much more subtle manner and that's precisely why he's a good example I want you to look at his work and to see how he's ideological and these are the people that I've mentioned look at it study it closely subtly sometimes their ideological in very subtle ways and just because I saw I call someone ideological doesn't mean that everything they say is a hundred percent wrong or that this person is bad or that this person doesn't have some good ideas that might be helpful to you right so you got again you got to be careful here nuanced none of this black and white thinking we're not going to be using this label of ideological just to label someone an ideologue and then to dismiss them and to demonize them as a bad person that we should never listen to and we should never engage in conversations with that would be to be ideological right so when we're talking about ideology it's very important that were sensitive and we're careful that we ourselves don't become the ideologues in calling other people ideological that in and of itself is an ideological trap so this requires awareness meta awareness of what you're doing as you're doing this analysis many of these thinkers are pretty sophisticated thinkers some at some times and they have good ideas in certain situations but then the problem of course is is that the good ideas are mixed in with various forms of sneaky ideology that oftentimes don't go unnoticed and that's actually what makes it so dangerous because when you got someone like alex jones most sane rational people can look at that can look at has ideological hysteria and they can see that well I mean clearly this guy has some screws loose and is not someone worth taking seriously as an intellectual but with some of these other people you can easily get seduced into thinking that they're not being ideological because a lot of times they're rational and they present good arguments and justifications and scientific studies and facts and and so on and they might even talk about spirituality they might even talk about meditation and that might get you a false sense at all well because someone talks about meditation that means or because they talk about ego death that means that they know what they're really talking about and they're they're actually not an ideologue when in fact they still have subtle ideologies lurking within them and ultimately the reason we'll be talking about ideology here is not because we want to be on people or demonizing them but really so that you understand how it works and then you can apply this understanding to yourself to find your own subtle ideologies and you probably are not a raving lunatic fanatic you have ideologies very likely but they're probably subtle forms of ideology and that's precisely where this conversation will be useful to you is if you're able to use it to isolate and pimp those hidden unconscious ideological positions that you hold which maybe you never even thought were ideological and now we're gonna be helping you to point those out and also just because you have some areas or some person has some ideological positions doesn't mean that everything they say is ideological you see so you have to be careful here be nuanced it's very easy to see how other people are ideological a lot of times but it's often a lot harder to see how you yourself are ideological many popular public figures are ideologues and that's because ideologic sells and it's actually addictive to the mind a very strong juicy mmm cohesive set of beliefs can be very addictive it can be more addictive than coffee or sugar or some other chemical substance to your mind ideology can be like crack that's what ideology is it's crack for the mind and of course drugs sell very well precisely because they're addictive cigarettes sell well because they're addictive because people keep coming back and that's why a lot of these public intellectuals and public figures they make entire careers around their ideologies because hey that's perfect for a career I can keep publishing books videos courses seminars speaking tours you know I can do this for the rest of my life if I'm if I'm selling a juicy ideology and then if if my ideology is a kind of ideology that is useful you know for example for certain politicians or people in power then I can actually get money from them to peddle this ideology because it becomes very useful to those in power for you know whatever um you know nefarious purposes they got but of course often those people who are peddling the ideology they themselves are the true believers usually someone who spreads an ideology has already been infected by it themselves thoroughly such that when they deliver it they look like they're really bought into it and that's actually what helps sell the ideology it's hard to sell an ideology you don't really believe in if you're just doing it purely for money so I'm not saying that many of these people are doing it purely for money what I'm saying is that the money just kind of feeds into their already existing passion about these ideas I love to study ideology by the way because it reveals so many deep inner workings of the human mind and it really helps me to serve like a mirror on myself to see how I'm misusing my own mind so I love to study neo-nazis and Alex Jones types and conspiracy theorists and arrogant scientists and atheists and rationalists and cults and just generally a history of knowledge looking through the history of philosophy the history of of science the history of politics are just looking for how are people misusing their minds to create these various kinds of ideologies which have existed since the the dawn of time and then all sorts of nasty stuff that happens there and also how they rationalize it to themselves because all of these people when they are preaching this ideology they they don't really understand what they're doing they really believe it so here are some examples of ideology materialism scientism atheism libertarianism ayan Rand capitalism socialism Christianity Catholicism Islam Hinduism Judaism logical positivism rationalism empiricism behaviorism the Hari Krishna's Scientology Darwinism creationism flat-earthers and all sorts of other kinds of conspiracy theorists which there are too many to enumerate here Alex Jones we've mentioned FoxNews Nazism nationalism sports very interestingly a lot of people become ideological about sports so their favorite sports teams conservativism communism nihilism racism morality morality is largely rooted in ideology Mormonism Buddhism very interesting because Buddhism has a lot of good stuff in it has a lot of very profound teachings but uh but you also to be careful because people start to take it on as an ideology MOG tao movement the men's rights movement red pill pickup feminism skepticism if you're very careful with skepticism because you might think that skepticism is the opposite of ideology but actually the way that most people practice skepticism these days that I see it's uh it's it's been turned into an ideology post-modernism pacifism veganism vegetarianism now again just because I might have listed your favorite ideology here one that you subscribe to don't get offended don't get defensive and and don't misunderstand me as saying that everything about that ideology is wrong oftentimes an ideology can contain some deep truth like Buddhism can contain some deep truth Christianity content contain some deep truth veganism and pacifism can contain some deep truth and skepticism can contain some deep truth and Anna and many times these ideology are taken on with good intentions so you have to make a distinction though between the content of an ideology and being ideological yourself right these are two different things so the real problem with ideology is not really the content per se it's how one goes about it how one holds it it's the fact that's one's attached to it and that one clings to it and that one builds an entire identity out of it that's the real problem because that then creates closed mindedness and stubbornness which leads to all sorts of problems that we'll be covering here in a moment so so you know I'm not saying that everything that feminism talks about is wrong there are definitely very important insights that feminism brought to the table that were very necessary and important for the liberation of women all right but it also can easily become an ideology so it's possible that you want equality for women and that you generally subscribe and believe in for example the the values of feminism without being an ideologue about it whereas other people they can believe the same stuff but then they become an ideologue about it and then that's really where the problems happen you know it's possible to just watch sports and just enjoy some sports without being an ideologue so I'm not saying that all sports are bad nor am I saying that Christianity is bad or evil or all of post-modernism is bad that's not what I'm saying I'm just saying don't be ideological about these things remember the number one rule don't be ideological and as it turns out you can almost turn anything ideological ideology is not baked into the content of your beliefs ideology is your mode of holding the belief such that it's not a question of God or no God science or religion no no that's not what it's about that's a that's a debate about the Conte what I'm talking about is the meta structure you can hold God in an ideological manner or not you can hold not God you could believe that there is no God in an ideological manner or not in an ideological manner you see so be very careful about making these distinctions why does nobody get ideological about bananas horses sunsets and diapers of course it's possible that you can get ideological about the even these things but generally people aren't ideological about this stuff because it doesn't really meet the criteria of why people get ideological about things in the first place and as we keep going here we're gonna explore deeper and deeper really the deep roots of why ideology exists at all what function does it that's it serve for the mind if the mind is doing it and it's expending a lot of time and energy doing it which it does and it's so pervasive across all human cultures found on every continent in the world across every era and generation for the last five thousand years which is the case so if it's so pervasive then what is the mind getting out of it well we're gonna explore that but first here let me tell you the things that people really get ideological about and you're gonna start to see some of the reasons and some of the deep the deep commonalities here the things people get most ideological about our identity issues like gender sex race ethnicity culture equality civil rights also metaphysical issues cosmology issues pertaining to the core of what you think reality is or to truth people get very ideological about what the truth is which of course brings in religion and God these are some of the most ideological topics also morality people tend to have very firm and stubborn positions about what they think is right or wrong or good and evil also issues of life and death the more serious an issue is the more likely someone is to be ideological about it now that should give you a little clue as to what is really going on with the mind but we'll make it more explicit a little later here as we go on also livelihood matters that relate to your livelihood or to your ability to feed yourself and to feed your family people tend to get ideological about and of course politics politics and power so are you seeing any commonalities here identity metaphysics life and death livelihood power sounds like maybe we're talking about the ego here huh and sometimes you find ideology even in the most unusual of places like for example in video games this always cracks me up because you would think that video games well I mean video games are just like light-hearted and fun what is there to be ideological about with video games but you know um if you're a gamer and you're into gamer culture and you hang around on online gaming forums and comment sections and so forth then you know just how ideological people can get about their video games and then you got the fanboys who are into the Xbox or they they hate the PlayStation but they love the Xbox or vice-versa they love the PlayStation or their Nintendo fans but they hate Sony you know and then you got other people who are just like playing games and they're kind of like maybe they they don't really care they they like Microsoft Sony and Nintendo to them it's all good as long as the game is good but then you got those fanatics who are like no even if it's a good game but it's coming out on a Playstation that's a that's a travesty or something like that and then they get into flame wars and debates and this goes on of course a lot of this because gamers are young usually teens are in their early 20s and and because they start to develop an identity around their gaming and they get like hardcore gamers and then because that they get I'll ideological about it about a thing which you would think it's a absolutely silly to be ideological about video games or about game consoles but also you find it for example with weightlifting with Fitness with diet people get very ideological about different kinds of diets paleo vegan vegetarian meat-eater carnivore this that or whatever your favorite fitness routines are whether you're into cardio or weight lifting or power lifting or bodybuilding or you know whatever you're doing you're doing the what's that one that everyone loves yeah it's like the px90 and this and that like all these different workout systems and then they they they they have start these like wars against each other and authors write books on the other system and and then they get into flame wars about this why does this happen again people are building an identity out of their fitness routines and out of their diets and as a final example of something that's very trivial but people can take ideological ease take art people can become ideological about art of all things you think art I mean what is there to be idle idle up ideological about and yet if you're in like the art critic world you know people get very ideological about various art styles and what they think is avant-garde or what they think is it deserves to be out on guard or not or whether it's a good piece of art or a bad piece of art or this is the right kind of school impression is and more abstract Impressionism or you know oh different schools that exist within art and historically there's been a lot of controversy within various art movements and people becoming closed-minded to new forms of art and criticizing in and bashing it only to accept it and embrace it 50 years later but to bash some other new art style so what I want you to notice is that virtually any content can be turned ideological depending on how you hold it whether you want to build an identity around it but of course a lot of content just isn't worth building an identity around and a lot of it very much depends on your culture so in certain cultures during certain eras of human history people would build an identity about art about fine art you know right now in our current era in our current Western culture most people don't care about fine art so it seemed pretty silly so instead they build a identity and become ideological around video games or weightlifting or diet or exercise or something like that all right so very much depends so you know in 500 years people will be becoming ideological about some other thing I don't know maybe some computer AI or something else you know some new gadget that comes out and they'll turn ideological about that and to them video games will be a thing of the past and they'll look at and say how could have anybody been ideologic about video games so it very much depends on where you're at what issues your culture is facing and also what kind of new stuff your culture is developing so usually it's the new stuff that comes out that oftentimes offends people who are defending the status quo and that they're trying to protect because they built an identity all around the old stuff and now this new stuff is threatening to undermine them spiral dynamics is illuminating here when we're talking about ideology because if you understand Sproul dynamics and I'm whole video series go check that out if you don't know what spell dynamics is referring to and what these colors are gonna be talking about is I'm gonna mention them here but the color stage is blue orange and green are ideological in their own ways and I'll tell you what they are in a minute but what I want you to understand here with ideology is that as you're developing up the spiral what's generally happening is that you're becoming more mature and you're becoming more conscious and your sense of self and identity is expanding larger and larger and larger and so as that happens your form of ideology becomes subtler and subtler and subtler and so while it's very easy and obvious to look at cultures that are deeply steeped in blue ideology which is traditional religious ethnocentric nationalist patriarchal Orthodox and often militaristic emphasizes strong borders and defense so you can find cultures like this in the Middle East or maybe in in parts of southern Asia and and you might look at those from our Western democracy if you're in Europe or in in America you might look at those you might say well yeah look look how ideological those Islamic people are in Iran or Iraq or something and that's very easy and obvious to see but what's a little harder to see is the next level of ideology which is orange orange has much less ideology than blue it's one developmental level up but it still has now its own version of ideology which is rational scientific materialist reductionist atheist analytical skeptic libertarian capitalist individualist and often secular now I'm not creating a false equivalency here by saying that orange is just as ideological as blue no orange is less ideological than blue but it's still ideological but of course because orange can't see above what comes after orange it can only see below where it came from it can see blue so orange oftentimes can't see its own ideology because it's so focused on the ideology of blue which is the case with sam harris and people who subscribe to his rationalism there's so much focus on the problems of blue that were ignoring the problems of orange but then you evolve beyond that and you go to green and of course green has its own form of ideology which is an egalitarian social justice warrior form of ideology here now we're fighting for the rights of all of mankind to put everyone on a level playing field and that's a great thing but again it can become ideological post-modernism can turn into an ideology environmentalism also very great and important innovation and green environmentalism but it can also go overboard into ideology socialism collectivism and green generally is not aware enough to understand its own ideology for that you need to go to the next level which is yellow and yellow is a quantum leap it's tier two it's beyond green and really it's the first stage that is really starting to understand ideology it's starting to understand the meta stuff that I'm talking about these meta mechanics is starting to see oh yeah ideology is not particularly one type of belief it's not particular to religion or it's not particularly to capitalism or whatever it's a very general function of the mind and that as the mind develops as culture develops as humanity develops the content always changes but the ideology stays and of course it also lessons and lessons and lessons as our consciousness rises but it's still there and yellow starts to become aware of this so really my goal with this episode is to help people who are still stuck in blue orange and green to rise up to yellow and to help people at yellow to really understand what's going on with the with the folks below them so they can understand them in a in a compassionate sort of way without demonizing them what does every ideology have in common quite a few things actually so firstly every ideology is conceptual and belief based and it's dependent on language in fact it's impossible to have an ideology without language and without concepts and without thinking that's pretty important that might seem obvious but that's pretty important pause and think about that if there was no language and no conceptualizing there would be no ideologies whatsoever of any kind imagine how how radically different the world would look without any ideologies of any kind without any of the stuff that I mentioned above cuz it would be impossible so that's important to understand and support understand that ideology is something your mind is doing and also that there's stuff outside your mind reality is not limited to just what's happening inside your mind reality is not limited to your conceptualizations so in fact you can sit there right now and stop all your conceptualizing and see well what the world looks like with no ideologies whatsoever because an ideology is only gonna occur when your mind is active of course that assumes you can actually quiet down your mind for more than three seconds which most people can't do without years of meditation but you can try just to verify what I'm saying here don't believe me verify everything that I'm saying in your direct experience try to stop your mind and see are any ideologies possible when your mind is not active when you're not thinking so that's their core commonality but also another commonality for all ideologies is that every ideology feels true due to confirmation bias because the mind will cherry-pick evidence to support and to justify the ideology and the evidence that presents will see very convincing so when you have an ideology it's not gonna feel like you have an ideology when you have an ideology it's gonna feel like you just have the truth but you understand reality that you've figured it out that's how it's gonna feel and it's gonna feel like everybody else is deluded and that's very tricky because what you're relying there is you're relying on your own sense of truthfulness to sort of judge whether you should believe yourself in or not and well how do you know that you can rely on that feeling especially when you know that there's confirmation bias and you know that whatever you believe your mind will go out and find the evidence cherry-pick the evidence to support that you see that's a very that's a very tricky dynamic right there and that should raise a lot of doubt within you about how confident you feel about whatever you think is true also every ideology basically claims absolute truth for itself even ideologies who don't believe in AI absolute truth but for example relativism like post-modernism doesn't believe in an absolute truth but then what it does ironically is that it holds that relativism is the absolute truth that's sort of the point of an ideology is to claim an absolute truth also already all ideologies are arrogant fundamental arrogance is involved to hold an ideology because to hold an ideology means that you're you're certain that what you have is correct and the truth and that you really understand reality and so you must convince yourself and to convince yourself you must think that what you've got is actually the way that it is and therefore fundamentally you believe that you've figured out reality because if you didn't believe that then why would you be so insistent why would you cling to this particular position that you hold you see if you were truly doubtful about something that you believed you wouldn't be ideological about it you would be sort of wishy-washy you wouldn't get very passionate about it and he didn't all emotional because again you're not sure about it if you're really not sure the reason this is arrogant is because you're grossly under estimating reality and this is common to all ideological positions is that they grossly underestimate reality the fundamental arrogance is that you believe that you've actually figured reality out when you haven't you don't know yet not even close just how complicated and how vast reality is and how little of it you really understand and even the stuff that you think you do understand how long it is and how it will get recontextualized with a broadening of of context and awareness and consciousness but see this is all lost on an ideologue an ideologue thinks that reality is just simple an ideologue thinks that reality is just this physical thing it's just a given we see it we know it we think about it we rationalize about it it's just logic it's just science we got it boom or it's written about in the Bible I read the Bible boom that's reality it can just be easily explained using language thinking a few diagrams a few examples a few models some mathematical formulas BAM we got it we got it but reality is not that way not even close but good luck explaining that to an ideal eye all ideologies are fundamentally stubborn and closed-minded that's the point of having an ideology is to close your mind down to further inquiry all ideologies refuse to self-reflect this is a very important feature that's common to them all an ideologue is not interested in turning inwards and really deeply questioning his own assumptions about the ideology an ideologue just wants to defend his ideology because he thinks it's already the truth so why self-reflect why question the truth when I've already got the truth makes no sense from the ideologues perspective except of course you're forgetting one thing what you think is the truth may not be the truth all ideologies lack self-awareness they don't see their own inner workings they lack awareness of the dynamics of the mind which is what I'm talking about in this episode all ideologies in one way or another refused to explore new perspectives and to have radically new experiences to open themselves up to new domains of experience almost all ideologies take themselves way too seriously because they think they're right and what they think they're right about they think is very important so they treat it seriously they're not humorous or not playful and in fact the more ideological a person is the more serious that person tends to be and that's one really good way to suss out ideologues is you see that they they take their ideologies very seriously especially when they're cornered and when you start to question them or watch what's watch them get all serious about it that's a very important clue as to what that ideology is really doing in their psyche there is a very important reason why they're so serious about it we'll get to that in a minute all ideologies tend to be black and white thinking they tend to fail to make subtle distinctions between different kinds of people or different kinds of situations they tend to lump stuff together in a black and white way which becomes problematic as I've already mentioned all ideologies are normative they tend to try to make rules that everyone has to follow even other people who don't subscribe to that ideology because see when you think you have the truth you're so convinced by it that you think everybody else who doesn't follow understand is deluded and therefore that you have to now force them to follow your truth and that's also a function of arrogance all ideologies are defensive because fundamentally they're in denial about some aspect of reality so this is why when you corner an ideologue they will get defensive sometimes very defensive emotionally so that's not a common feature is that all ideologies are actually emotional they're not grounded in truth or in logic the way you might think or in reasons or in evidence they're really grounded in emotion and the irony of it is that even people who think that they're atheists or rationalist or scientific or skeptical that itself is rooted in emotion it's rooted deep down it's rooted in fear it's rooted in attachment it's rooted perhaps in hatred of various kinds so there's various kinds of emotions that come into play but always ideology is emotional because it's serious and for you it's it's not a game it's a matter of life and death your very identity hinges on it and that's why emotions come into play because emotions those things think about it that you're the most emotional about what are they they are the things that are life and death yeah of course you can you can laugh at some comedian saying some joke that's not life and death but the stuff that you have strong negative emotions about your deepest fears anxieties jealousies envies and hatreds those are those are the deepest strongest most human emotions and those all have to do with your survival so the reason that ideology is emotional is because it has something to do with your survival not just ideas but your survival your very life is on the line with ideologies these are not just ideas for philosophers we're not just talking about philosophy here these ideologies they govern how you live they govern your opportunities in life they govern who you can have sex with they govern who you will marry they govern who you're gonna support as a leader of your tribe they're gonna govern where you work how you earn a livelihood you see all of this is life-and-death stuff for you another common element of ideologies is ideologies attack they get defensive but then when you question them too much they lash out and they start to attack they judge they criticize they blame a scapegoat they demonize and sometimes this can even get a physically violent all ideologies use projection to defend themselves because the ideology is disowning some part of reality or your own self to successfully do that what needs to happen is the psyche needs to project that out onto other people so the irony is is that if you're a highly ideological you will actually think that other people are highly ideological who disagree with you when in fact they might not be like I might just say something to you that will destroy your ideology you will then think that I'm the ideological one for telling you that and sometimes you see YouTube comments down there criticizing me on just that very ground it's a projection it's an egoic projection the person's own is being pointed out to them but instead they assumed that no you're the deluded one leo you're the one who's full of and of course how do you arbitrate between who is and who isn't full of well that's the very uh it's a very deep epistemic question not so easy to answer but an ideologue doesn't care about that an ideologue just / checks out and just as well that person's crazy that bursts the criminal that person's deluded that person's a religious nut case whatever another common element of all ideologies that they cause suffering they all do to various degrees now I'm not saying they're all the same some ideologies can cause the suffering of millions of people and some ideologies they just cause suffering within you internally oftentimes it's actually both most ideologies do both especially if it's a widely adopted ideology it will harm many millions of people disenfranchised and and and damaged many people physically in the physical realm but also psychologically internally it's gonna damage them as well with guilt and with shame and with criticism and blame and self-hatred and hatred of other people and toxicity and negativity and all that all ideologies also are incapable of explaining all of reality all ideologies are necessarily partial which is why they're not the absolute truth and the reason you can't explain all of reality with an ideology is because all of reality is infinite and your explanations will always be finite now this is a deep point that I can't go into here probably those of you will understand who have heard me talking about infinity before and y-you can't conceptualize infinity you can't turn infinity into a belief so reality is itself and you can't encapsulate it down into any kind of a belief system or any kind of system whatsoever symbolic or conceptual and so all your explanations of reality will always fall short of reality itself because you're explaining is itself a part a small part of the total reality so by definition it will always be incomplete and that's a big problem with ideologies because what if you want to understand reality as a whole not a part but a whole you might say well that's impossible but actually you're wrong about that it is possible it's not possible though with ideologies it is possible through other means and that's the problem the ideology is that they they they close down the mind from people accessing those other means because they think ideology is the only thing and that's one of the other things that ideologies do is ideologies always create this bubble around themselves such that everything that you see reinforces your ideology you will surround yourself with people and friends and you will read the kind of books and watch the kind of TV and subscribe to the kind of YouTube channels who reinforce your bubble of ideology such that that will make it seem like your ideology is true that's what your ideology really is about it's about creating this bubble of reality another common element of ideologies is that no ideology understands the nature of consciousness itself and all of the levels and stages of consciousness that exist because if the ideology did then you would be way too conscious to hold an ideology and all ideologies spread themselves like viruses so what ideology does is ideology confuses beliefs for reality it fails to make a distinction between belief and experience between concept and between actuality actuality what's true what's actual right now in your direct experience not something you think or believe or some theory or some scientific thing or some religious thing that you've been told but actuality actuality means this present moment right now you need to distinguish this present moment which is actual from all your ideas about it or all of your ideas about reality whether they're religious or scientific or anything else that distinction needs to be made but this distinction is precisely what the ideologue fails to do for the ideologue these these two are blended and this is actually on purpose because the ideologue is trying to construct a conceptual reality and in fact for the ideologue the distinction between reality and fantasy is actually ironically blurred and non-existent he cannot distinguish between what's actual and what's figments of his imagination and that's precisely what the mind wants so that the mind can construct its own reality conducive to its own survival that's what the game is all about all ideologues fail to understand this very simple but super important point which is that the truth can never be captured with beliefs or with models or with mathematics of any kind ever never ever ever not even close this is completely lost on the ideologue the ID lock does not understand why this is the case because if the ideologue actually understood why the truth cannot be captured with beliefs or concepts of any kind then that would destroy a lot of his ideology that he claims to so why is ideology so problematic well there's multiple reasons firstly because it closes the mind to genuine inquiry an ID law cannot do serious research or inquiry into any question because he has a position and already made answer to the question which he thinks is true so he needs the research or the inquiry to deliver the answer that he already believes is true so he can't do an objective unbiased honest thorough inquiry into the subject because he already thinks he's got the answer and so that answer is actually biasing him from doing it a totally open search and that's it becomes a real problem because if there's something that is counter to what this person's position is he'll never find it because he always needs the research or the inquiry to deliver the thing he already believes so it's it always will it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy this is confirmation bias in another form another reason that it's so problematic is become it becomes an egoic identity you develop this big identity you get attached to your ideology such that when your ideology is damaged threatened or questioned you actually feel it as a personal attack on yourself and it feels like a life-and-death matter it feels like you're being physically attacked it doesn't feel like we're just playing with ideas in philosophy class it feels like I'm physically attacking you with a knife and that's why you get so defensive about it because literally what's happened is that your physical identity has merged with your ideas about reality and who you are and what you think is important in life they have merged the distinction between who you actually are and what you believe has disappeared such that when I attack a belief of yours you would think well Leo attackee I believe of mine that's not like attacking me physically with a knife that would be true if you hadn't blurred the distinction between your physical body and the beliefs you hold in fact your physical body is one of the beliefs you hold in fact physical reality is one of the beliefs you hold such that when I questioned physical reality or what you actually perceived that as if you take me seriously is an assault on your very physical being in your very existence this is not a philosophical discussion which is precisely why your mind will immediately tune it out such that when I tell you that physical reality is an idea that you hold and that it's not actually real it doesn't actually exist and when I tell you for example that your body is actually an idea that you hold and it has no no real substance to it whatsoever and that you're not your body if I tell you that for most people their mind will not even get to the point of seriously entertaining what I just said because it will be immediately dismissed by the mind because it's way too threatening of a notion to take seriously so instead the mind goes and pulls out its weapons like ridicule and attack and character assassination and demonization and scapegoating and blaming and criticizing and judging all these weapons come out the mind goes on the offensive precisely because what I'm saying is so threatening and the only reason it's threatening is because it's true but of course the mind is not going to entertain this even if you think you're entertaining it that's just another trick of the mind so you might say Oh Leo I'm not I'm not as ignorant and closed-minded as these people you think that I'm like I'm not like that I'm willing to sit here and seriously entertain that physical reality isn't real nobody see that's just another trick you've tricked yourself what you said there is you've programmed your mind with another belief to tell yourself yeah I'm willing to entertain it but you're not really entertaining it you're just masturbating intellectually with it to you it's just philosophy you're not seriously inquiring it'll take you many years of beating around the bush before you get to actually seriously inquiring about what I just said and when you do you'll get scared and when you do you'll realize just how physically threatening this is that's not philosophy and when you do at some point you'll realize why you've been avoiding it your whole life and you've been playing all these games and throwing up all these smoke screens you're like a squid squirting screens of ink to get away because the truth is a predator and it's chasing you all the time so your mind has to be playing these these squid inking games and because your mind is a survivor and you're a survivor and you're still alive then see you've gotten really good at it you're very skillful at it so the mind will will weasel its way out it'll snake its way and like a slippery eel it will just come up with all sorts of excuses and everything just till to to shut the mind off to not think about any of this stuff la la la la la la la la that's what it's like the reason ideology is problematic is because it locks the mind into one single perspective and what human growth and development about is about is about expanding your capacity to take on more and more perspectives so at every level of the spiral dynamics spiral each stage what's actually happening as you're moving from blue to orange is your you're taking on an additional perspective and then to move from orange to green you're taking on an additional perspective taking on more and more and more and more perspectives and that's precisely what ideology is trying to prevent you from doing so really ideology is stopping your ability to grow and to develop that's why it's such an important topic and we're covering in so much detail another problem with ideology is that it oversimplifies matters because it wants to judge and blame and demonize so it's not really interested in exploring an issue seriously it's interested in creating a straw man out of it and then beating down that straw man it also disowns parts of reality and this creates a shadow which you then drag around with you for the rest of your life and the shadow acts up in ways that you don't see that it's the shadow that's causing this stuff and for that you'll have to wait for my shadow work episode where I'll talk about shadow and how to work with your shadow and uncover the shadow in more detail it's also problematic because it makes people intolerant it tends to be oppressive violent and cruel most of the world's violence comes from ideology non-ideological people rarely become violent only on the under the most extreme circumstances when their their physical survival is threatened ideology is problematic because it wastes time and energy people devote their entire lives to defending an ideology arguing it for it proving it spreading it debating it and so forth it's also problematic because it radicalizes people it polarizes it fragments ideology fragments reality fragments people fragments society into pieces and then these fragments also then our become antagonistic towards one another this is radicalization polarization and then this creates hatred or in other words ideology is the opposite of love and consciousness which is the whole purpose of development and the whole purpose of life is to become more conscious and more loving ideology stalls real solutions and progress because people waste all their time and energy attacking others that no viable solutions come out and people are so black and white that any solutions they come up with are so simplistic that they can't work in the real world and handle all the nuances and so no real progress is possible so long as people are ideological which is for example the problem with the situation in Israel and Palestine the reason that problem can't get resolved is because both sides have been radicalized and therefore the real solutions which exist there exists real solutions in fact Spile dynamics is a very real solution to the israeli-palestinian problem but it can't work so long as people are radicalized it's also problematic because it corrupts science to be able to do true high quality science you need to be extremely open-minded way more open-minded than most scientists are willing to be and you need be completely non ideological and you need to question all of your fundamental metaphysical and epistemic assumptions which most scientists are not willing to do so the reason that science is evolutionary it has to grow on top of itself and struggle with itself and that their paradigm shifts as Thomas Kuhn famously talked about within science the reason our scientific revolutions is precisely because of ideology because science becomes ideological then it takes fifty two hundred years to break down that ideology for the next paradigm to arrive and then that becomes the new ideology and then it takes another years - to break that one down and then there's a new ideology and so on it goes and the last reason ideology is problematic is because it even sours truthful things such that even if you have some kernel of truth within your ideology it will get tainted by the fact that you've turned it into an ideology such that you will actually cause harm with this truth more than good which is what happens for example with many religions many religions contain valuable insights about human development growth spirituality how to be a better person how to meditate and this sorts of stuff but it's completely soured and tainted and corrupted those truthful nuggets are completely corrupted by the fact that it's been turned into an ideology and it's been systematized and written in a Bible in a book and now people are forced to memorize it and and spout it off without any direct experience of those truthful kernels so what is the deep function of ideology it's to maintain a sense of separate self-identity ideology is used to build identity it actually is who you are is your ideology there's not such a clear distinction as you might think between your physical body and all the beliefs that you hold about reality because like I said the very notion that you are and have a physical body in a physical reality is itself an ideology that you hold and precisely the reason why you will deny that it's AI and ideologies plessy than it is an ideology that's why you deny it it's the people who hold an ideology it's not like they walk around thinking yeah I'm holding an ideology me and my precious ideology know someone who holds an ideology successfully is someone who actually just walks around thinking that hey this is reality this is how things are they couldn't be any other way it's not your mind never labels it ideology in the mind no scientist thinks he's ideological no religious believer who believes in God thinks that it's just an ideology they believe it's true they believe it's reality they oftentimes believe it's the ultimate truth whether they're scientific or religious so whatever ideology you're building you're doing it to create your sense of self and also to maintain a sense of reality because if you're honest what is reality anyways but your ideas about reality without an ideology what would reality really be to you you would be lost you would be groundless you have to anchor yourself in something so what you do is you create the notion of reality and then what that is is whatever you want it to be whatever your mind finds convenient whether it's religion or science or atheism or communism or veganism or whatever that is missing and so literally we're talking about riadi ology we're talking about reality without an ideology you can tell and distinguish between what is real and what's not real you need an ideology to tell you that which is why you get very defensive about it because if you were to really surrender all your ideologies you would have to admit that you don't really know anything and you don't even know what reality is you don't even know you're not even sure if you were ever born if you really get rid of all your ideas and then where would you be then you'd be lost you'd be confused you'd be floating around just aimlessly groundless and of course you don't want that the deep function of ideology is to actually disown and deny certain aspects of reality because certain aspects of reality are so radically weird that the mind can't accept them and so what the mind does is disowns them what do I mean by disowning you might wonder leo how is my ideology about atheism or about scepticism how is that disowning some aspect of reality I don't get it well here's here's an analogous example people often disown evil in the world because their mind can't comprehend how the world can possess so much evil so when you see some evil happening on the evening news you might skip over it you might turn your head away from the images because it's just too much evil and you got to disown it and even if you don't turn your face away from the images what you'll do is you might look at the images but then you'll create a story explaining those images and disowning those images through your explanation for example you will say ah that person who was murdered that was done by a by some radical Islamist terrorists and their evil and see what you did though there is that you've actually denied and disowned that aspect of reality and yourself because what you did is you've created to split you fragmented realia said oh well they are the the evil terrorists and then there's all of us good guys like me and so it's the good guys like me I guess the terrorists and and you might say well Leo but that's what would how else could it be what are you talking about I mean that terrorists killed somebody and you might be right that terrorists might have killed somebody but what you're disowning and denying is the fact that actually consciousness is one all of it is one that's very advanced but uh try to try to try to stay with me everything is one all of conscious is one so literally that terrorist that you think kills somebody and maybe he did kill somebody that is all true but what you're denying is the fact that actually there's no separation between you and the terrorists and that literally that terrorist is you and so that doesn't fit your ideas of you being a good citizen if you had good human being right because because to do that to say that you're good you have to deny all the parts of reality that are actually bad and also you have to limit yourself you can't be the whole world because if you were the whole world all of reality it wouldn't be so easy to say that you're good because there's rapists and terrorists out there and more criminals and thieves and corrupt politicians right so you have to you have to do to disown and deny and sever your connection from all those people you have to dehumanize all them but not just to humanize them you have to also say that they are not me they are not you literally you have to say that you're separate from them because otherwise you would admit that reality is a mixed bag of of good and evil stuff and some aspects of reality are very cruel and a very upsetting and so it's much more pleasant for you to come for the story of how all those bad evil people are doing nasty stuff rather than admitting that reality is realities this very big thing and it takes a lot of maturity to accept every aspect of reality as actually being yourself takes a lot of responsibility to do that but of course you don't want all that responsibility you want a pleasant story such that it doesn't even make sense to you what I'm talking about here because it seems like I'm crazy that I'm insane to even be suggesting that you might be physically similar or actually identical with a terrorist right like to most people that doesn't even make sense that's not even something they can think about intellectually it's so far well it's it's just it's too true it's it's so far outside their consciousness that they can't even imagine how it could possibly be true and nevertheless it is but to discover that you'd have to raise your consciousness and spend many years deconstructing are all your ideologies including all your physicalist scientific materialist ideologies to actually understand that which is our goal here under deep function of ideology is to stop you from questioning reality when you have a nice juicy ideology you have no reason to question reality not fundamentally not really because you already think you got it you think you got it basically figure it out and the rest is just window dressing yeah there's some stuff I don't know but science will figure it out in the next hundred years and it won't really change much that kind of attitude keeps the mind from actually questioning reality and the reason that that is is because if you start to question reality you'll start to see reality unravel like a sweater where you pull on on a loose thread and the whole sweater unravels that's what is gonna happen if you really start questioning reality and you go outside of all ideologies and so what an ideology really is is sort of like some glue which is holding that little loose thread in place such that you couldn't pull on it but if you pull in hard enough you'll break past the glue and then you keep pulling on it and you discover that the entire sweater is made of one single yarn and that the entire thing will unravel and that all that was ever holding it in place was that little bit of glue that um that was your ideology and so the function of the ideology is like a cement or a glue which keeps your reality from unraveling physical reality the point of ideology is also to prevent new experiences because as you expose yourself to radically new experiences for example psychedelic experiences out-of-body experiences maybe some astral projection type of thing or some lucid dreaming or some near-death experience or some experience of a radically different culture than your culture like maybe you lived in in the rural south of America and you travel to Scandinavia and you discover that all those Scandinavian people don't have it so bad or maybe you travel to some part of Africa where they do have it really bad and you see oh my god these people have it so bad there that it actually shatters your reality you can no longer go back to your cloistered existence where you you went to work and you did your normal 95 job and and you you ate all your food and you threw all your half your food of plate away in the trashcan and you were wasting all these resources and this and that and you were just being completely oblivious to the suffering of other human beings around them around the world or the suffering of animals and the environment right so as you expose yourself more to the suffering of humans the suffering of animals the damage to the environment that's being done by society and all the abuse that exists out there all the corruption as you expose yourself more to that you're exposing yourself to more diverse perspectives and what that's doing is that's actually breaking down your reality and then if you sort to expose yourself to radically new experiences like deep psychedelic experiences you go take some ayahuasca or something that will actually destroy your reality because your perspective will change so much that you will never be able to come back to your current perspective and hold it as the one true perspective anymore ever in your entire life because you've seen something so radically different by exposing yourself to new experiences you're exposing yourself to new weird unknown aspects of reality which force you to challenge your existing models and paradigms because see your your existing models and paradigms they were built upon your present base of experience which for most people is a very limited base of experience mostly have lived in the same place their entire life same city same state same country eat the same kind of food hang out with the same kind of people in the same kind of family go to the same kind of job for decades and decades and decades such that for them they don't need robust models of reality they don't need to open their mind significantly because for them to explain their super limited and constrained band of experience you know if the whole range of life experience is like this then for most people they have like one millimeter worth of of life experience so for them they don't need to bother to explain the entire spectrum the other 99% cuz all they got is that 1% and when you got 1% you can't tell the difference between the 1% and 90% 99% because the 99% is outside of your awareness you haven't experienced it so you don't need to come up with any kind of models to explain it you don't need to struggle you don't need to read book so you don't need to go to seminars you don't need to to go to gurus and ask them profound questions about life because your life has been so boring and simple that there's nothing there to reconcile there's no paradoxes you haven't encountered any contradictions you haven't encountered any existential crises but as you open yourself to more to new experiences you will start to experience contradictions and paradoxes and you'll become confused and you won't be able to explain the stuff that you see in the world and you will see that all the explanations that were given to you by your culture by your religion by your science by your teachers by your family that none of them explain what you're seeing and then you will actually now start to go off looking for the answers because now you will really understand and have some deep questions most people they don't have any deep questions about life and another deep function of ideology is to prevent self reflection the ideology prevents you from looking inwards why is that because if you looked in words you would discover your true nature if you looked in words deeply enough and what you would discover there is actually that you're nothing and that your true nature is completely empty and precisely not all of these things that you've been identifying with your whole life including your body and all your images and all your cultural attachments and all the roles that you play and all the identities and all the masks you wear it's precisely not any of those things those are all constructions that requires a lot of deep self reflection so ideology prevents that self reflection from even getting started because it's so dangerous because it actually involves physical death to realize this that uh that you don't even want to go down that path you don't even want to begin you don't even want to take one step down that path at least most people don't for most people ideology happens through imprinting they get imprinted with it as they're growing up because you see when you're born you're born knowing absolutely nothing and so you're just thrown into this life into this reality and you're trying to make sense of it and you have no idea what any of it is like when you start you don't really even know who your mother and your father are or what that even means you see how deep of a problem this is you know nothing you don't know why you're here what you're meant to do here what's right what's wrong you don't know what's safe you don't know what's gonna kill you you don't know if you can stick your hand in that fire you don't know if you can stick your tongue in that electrical socket you don't know anything all right so as you're growing up your number one priority is survival and so you quickly have to learn and assemble some kind of models of reality to allow you to survive and not to die not to jump off a cliff or not to run across the street when cars are coming right if to quickly build up your reality and as a kid that's what you're doing and you're not doing it perfectly you do get hurt you break your leg you break a finger you stick your hand in the fire you burn yourself blah blah blah stuff happens to you right pain suffering and so quickly through pain and suffering you learn the stuff you shouldn't be doing and as you're doing that your parents are quickly teaching you stuff your school is filling your mind with information you have no idea what you're being filled with you have no idea how to check if it's true or not you don't know they teach you math you don't know if it's true you have no eye you just accept it they choose you science you have no idea your stupid little kid you just accept it religion you just accept it you accept everything cuz you don't know any better so whatever you're imprinted with that's what you got that's what creates your sense of reality it's not about the truth of the content of the things that you're being imprinted with it's just about what gets imprinted into you first that's what you consider true and then by the time you're around twenty your brain and mind just sort of solidifies it matures and it locks in it's not growing so quickly anymore and and now your identity has formed now you have a sense of who you are cuz you were a teenager in high school and you develop your sense of identity and now you think you know everything now you think you know who you are you think you're cool you're hot and whatever you think you are that's who you are a man a woman a trans a gay of this is but whatever whatever race you think you are whatever ethnicity you think you are whatever religion you think you are you've created this identity and now you fused who you physically are with this programming and where does programming come from were you some brilliant Einstein sitting in a cave in a basement somewhere coming up with all this stuff no it came from your culture and all your friends and teachers and parents and all this it's highly unaligned to be exactly like your parents in your beliefs exactly like your culture exactly like your friends and teachers with a few rare exceptions mostly you're just like them because you're completely unoriginal so you were programmed with this to such an extent that you got very comfortable with it such that you don't even know any alternatives such that you think that this is reality because this is this is all you've known so you were born as this nothing a blank slate and now you come into the world and you've been programmed with all this crap and now you think you are this crap that you've been programmed with and you feel so comfortable with it that now you will defend it to the death as actually being you and now you'll run around spreading it you'll write books shoot videos or leave stupid snarky YouTube comments about this and about that you'll judge or criticize or demonize you'll you'll hate Islam or Christianity you'll hit science you'll hate God you'll hate this whatever you hate you hate that you create an identity out of it that's why you hate it and now that you're gonna be doing that as like a robot zombie for the rest of your life without understanding why you're doing it or what the the deep dynamics of it are and also all of this creates a a sense of belonging for you which satisfies the belonging need which is a very important need that humans have you have a need to belong to feel like you belong to some tribe to a community of people even if you're an individualist like even if you fancy yourself some individuals libertarian freedom for all free markets this sort of thing you're not doing that alone why are you libertarian out of a sense of belonging that very label libertarian makes you belong with all the other libertarian friends who think just like you who think that their individualist when in fact of course it's all just a group thing see so religion gives you a sense of belonging science gives you a sense of belonging post-modernism gives you a sense of belonging whatever you believe your race your ethnicity your heritage it all gives you a sense of belonging and it makes you feel all nice and warm and snuggly inside and it makes you feel like okay yeah I got I got figured out here I know what this is basically doing I know how to survive in life and that's all true until one day you experience something out of the blue something radically new something very different something that jars you out of your sense of complacency such that you no longer feel like you belong or you start to suspect that you're sort of living in the matrix and all this stuff that you thought was real maybe it's not so real anymore and you start to question it and as you pull on that thread the the sweater unravels more and more and more and all of a sudden you start to feel like you belong less and less and less and as your self actualizing you're listening more and more to me talk all the sudden you can't relate to your friends to your co-workers to your job anymore to your to your political party anymore to your coworkers - your sports team - any kind of spiritual attachments you had even scientific ideas even secular ideas you can't even relate to them anymore because now you're getting into spirituality and you can't relate to spiritual people either because they're ideological and dogmatic so it's like you're lost you don't belong anywhere and so then you start to create an identity out of actualize not org so that now you can think of yourself as belonging to actualize I don't remember you think you're an actual Iser or you're now doing non-duality or whatever and then you you try to get your sense of belonging that way because deep down you're all alone you came into this world completely alone and really if you're honest you're completely alone even right now in even in the midst of all the that you got in your life all the friends and family and kids and wife and all this whatever you've got going even in the midst of all that you're still fundamentally alone and disconnected and that's still there inside you haven't faced that really and so that's what you do is you run around and you busy yourself filling your life with a bunch of distractions and to create a sense of belonging a sense of identity and a sense of reality in a sense that oh no I got this figured out but then of course you've only got it figured out so long as reality is going your way as soon as reality stops going your way the hits the fan you have a conniption cuz cuz you realize that you ain't got it figured out you know you lose your job your wife leaves you when your kids dies your dog gets run over by a car etc and all of a sudden you don't gotta figure it out anymore you take some psychedelic trip you take too many mushrooms Halden sudden you don't got to figure it out anymore umm and the whole facade this whole ideological facade starts to crumble why do ideologues spread their ideology why are they so passionate about that because spreading distracts from self-reflection spreading consumes a lot of time and energy you could spend the next 20 years of your life spreading something whatever your religion your science your atheism your skepticism your political affiliation your gender politics your environmental ideas your veganism or actualized at work whatever you got a spread right that takes a lot of time and energy which should properly be used on self-reflection so this is what I call the lesser jihad the lesser jihad is alluring to yourself outwards and wasting a lot of your time crusading against stuff in the world the greater jihad is turning inwards and self reflecting so ideology gives ideologues a foe life purpose what do I mean by a foe life a fake life purpose if you've taken my life purpose course you might know how powerful life purpose is most people don't realize how powerful life purpose is even though I keep talking about the course but still goes over people's heads but what you see it's also possible to create a sort of fake life purpose and this is what a lot of intellectuals do a lot of these public intellectuals who are ideologues they create a sense of life purpose for themselves but it's grounded in spreading an ideology and this is what is happening for example with the radical Islam why is radical Islam so appealing in areas in the Middle East because the Middle East is rather underdeveloped stage red and blue mostly in those places you know places like Afghanistan it's mostly red in Afghanistan even purple like it's super underdeveloped there Afghanistan Yemen Iraq these sorts of places right so purple to red level of development maybe a little hints of blue difficult to make a living difficult to start a family difficult to start a business difficult to do personal development work so what do you got like you got nothing there then people who live there they got nothing so in that situation some preacher comes to you I mean all you've really got is Islam but it's a purple red version of Islam bluish version of Islam so you got some preacher who comes to you maybe he's blue and he can preach some good Islamic scriptures to you and you feel like aw man that's that's something that's something I can hold on to and then you build your life purpose around that and pretty soon you're radicalized you got no real good career prospects or anything like that you can't really develop a serious genuine deep life purpose the way that I talked about in my course because in those countries there's not enough infrastructure to allow you to do that in many cases of course don't make that a limiting belief but in many cases you know it's hard too much harder to do it there than in Western democracies and and so this person takes on the life purpose of be hub becoming a jihadi and blowing himself up or helping them make bombs or train whatever right why does that happen because because it serves the egos deficiency needs it's a way to get a sense of belonging with compatriots and friends it's a way to get a sense of identity a sense of who you are it's a it's a way to get a sense of direction and clarity in your life because if you're lost at least now when you're making bombs you got a sense of direction you're doing something for some cause it doesn't even matter that it's is it because it a good cause a bad cause is it killing innocent people not to say that that's a that's a tertiary concern what matters is that now you have a sense of direction you as a self eat a sense of direction in life so now you got that maybe they're paying you some money so you got that maybe you even start to go to a party here and there because you're hanging out with friends ever they introduce you to a girl so maybe you even get a wife so now you got that now you got a family now you got kids you got to pay the kids and it's providing you money for doing that so see all your deficiency needs are being met by your ideology and by your identity but of course don't think that that's only happening in a or Afghanistan somewhere it's happening right now it's happening to some of the most prominent intellectuals that you see on YouTube and in the media writing books and giving speeches and tours and lectures and all this they're doing the exact same thing it's a faux life purpose the reason it's a faux life purpose is because it really it's your only satisfying your deficiency needs and your your what you're doing is that you're clinging to some position and now you're advocating and spreading that position and that's not what life purpose is supposed to be about I mean like you look at Alex Jones he certainly created a life purpose for himself with his work he's been doing that for like 10 or 20 years now right but that would not be what I would consider huh you know a genuine true life purpose because I he's totally bought into it like for him it's serving all of his deficiency needs and that's all that that ego cares about damn the cost doesn't matter who's hurt or whatever happens none of that matters it's it's a sense of direction and it's a way to become successful and these people once they start to become successful the money just validates the ideology because the person thinks that oh well I have got millions of subscribers and followers and I've got a book deal and a thousand people came to my lecture series and I get all these positive comments and emails and all this so that must mean I'm doing something right that means it can't be a faux life purpose that means it must be real and so through this a self-fulfilling prophecy effect occurs such that then this person gets stuck in this ideology and to them it doesn't feel like an ideology it feels like life feels like reality feels like truth it feels like they're a a messenger for the truth for the good that they're fighting against the evil ones the postmodernist the Socialists the globalists the the Communists the villains the terrorists the this that whoever the enemy is you're fighting against them and it feels good you have a sense of direction but actually it's a it's a facade of a life purpose a true life purpose would be satisfying your being needs not just your deficiency needs and that comes from Abraham Maslow's hierarchy you know the bottom the pyramid is deficiency needs the very top of the pyramid is being needs which very few people get to and you can't really blame this very tricky stuff this is super tricky stuff this takes years to understand all these subtle and tricky dynamics the mind is extremely self deceptive as I've elaborated on in my three-part series called self deception mechanisms why do I D log spread their ideology it gives the mind security in an otherwise insecure world and it avoids the pain of going through an existential crisis think about it think about it from the position of one of these big-name celebrity intellectuals who's actually an ideologue think about how difficult it would be for them to admit that their entire career and life's work and all their success is predicated upon an ideological position and that what they're really doing is that they are engaged in the lesser jihad not the greater jihad think of how painful that would be you'd have to give up hundreds of thousands of dollars adoring fans sex and career prospects and the ability to feed your family your very livelihood all of that is at stake and now you have to give all that up in the name of truth hell no you think they're gonna do that hell no no they're not gonna do that that thought is not even going to enter their mind because of how painful it would be to go through that kind of existential crisis to re tool your entire career from the ground up to admit you've been wrong to admit you've deceived people deluded yourself and others that you've been engaged in the lesser jihad just like those savages in the Middle East to admit that come on that's that's that's huge like that takes balls that takes real balls to go through the pain of admitting that no ego will want to admit that instead the Eagle will hump with excuses rationalizations scientific evidence theories and studies to back up why everything is doing is correct tricky stuff huh ideology is very useful for manipulating the masses that's also why it's so widespread it eliminates independent and careful thinking nuanced thinking because it radicalizes people so because of this this allows people who know how to use and manipulate ideology to create a power base so it's really about power and of course who loves power the ego loves power the ego is power-hungry the ego wants all the goodies that come with power and wealth and success sex and luxury and amenities and lodge and the the easy life and the flashy things the gadgets the clothes and the watches and all this the reputation the status the acclaim the love that comes with it all this comes with power and it's super addictive to the ego you taste a little bit of power and you want more and more and more it's insatiable ideology gives you the power to mobilize a mob because once you've eliminated their independent thinking they've become a mob and his group think and it's just uniform and also you radicalized it therefore you've made it very emotional therefore it's there to trigger and push its buttons just by saying some one thing or scapegoating some one situation somebody does something you scapegoat them the whole mob gets riled up you can use that mob now to do whatever you want it to do you have power with power comes wealth with power comes sex which are all your core biological needs it's not like just all sex like you just want to have some hot girl or it's like oh well if I just want some fancy car no no no this is what your whole survival is right you understand we're living in a modern society which is the equivalent of what it would be like a hundred thousand years ago you living in the forest hunting for squirrels whether with a stick so the modern-day equivalent of hunting for squirrels with a stick so you don't starve to death is money business eyeballs fans sex with some hot girl with fake tits and driving a Lamborghini that's the modern-day equivalent of being in the forest hunting with a stick and maybe once in a while you catch a deer or something you got enough meat to share with your friends so they love you for it and maybe you've got some some fancy cheese seashells at the seashore and you made a necklace out of them and that's your Lamborghini that's what that is today the 21st century so of course within human society because we have the capacity to use language and oratory and logic and ideology what we can do is we can rile up a mob a personal mob I can create a personal mob of my own which I can use to serve all of my survival needs and then these these vocal fanatics who are going to be part of my mob they are gonna be loyal adoring fans of mine who will kiss my ass and do me all the favors that I want from giving me to buying me things to hosting me parties and inviting me out to their houses to sleep at to travel around the world all this right this is super easy I could do this if I want to do this with actualize that already I could do it tomorrow all of this all of it super easy if I wanted to and it's extremely easy to sell to a uniformed emotional mob who's afraid and who has some enemy that we're gonna scapegoat super easy to sell stuff the easiest way to sell stuff because when you have very nuanced independently thinking highly conscious individuals it's hard to sell to them the only thing you could sell to them is something that will actually help to raise their consciousness which eliminates a whole ton of that you could sell whereas if you have a dumb uniform emotional mob you could sell them all sorts of right like if I got you riled up about the fact that the end of the world is coming next year I can start selling you MREs survival kits you know cans of food buckets of food and guns and bullets and camo gas masks you know whatever for the zombie apocalypse that's coming next year I can start to sell you all that if all I do is I just build up an ideology in your mind over a course of 10 or 20 episodes that this is really real and it's coming and you start to believe it you're gonna start to buy that up and you're gonna thank me for it and I could charge you double for it you see how this works not to mention I haven't even even gotten into the political aspects of how you can use these mobs to effect what's happening in the political sphere you can actually get people elected or kicked out of office and all the power and wealth and prestige and status that comes with that with being able to have that kind of power that's what's going on it's going on right now see how the game is played so what's the opposite of ideology then open-mindedness not knowing experience consciousness being presence truth actual truth not truth conceptualized or truth it's belief but actual truth actual truth this is right actual truth right right now this is actual truth an empty mind wisdom detachment and unconditional love these are all the opposites of ideology and now you can see why I'm so big talking about ideology and we're going to so much detail because look what we're Altima after with development and with self-actualization is to have everything I just listed so the enemy of that is ideology rather than just listening and believing me what I would like you to do is to actually experience directly in your experience what it feels like to not be ideological you can actually hit this point where you sit down sit down with a journal contemplate what ideology is and ultimately relinquish all your ideology so much that you get to this point of just not knowing presence just being very present in the moment right now and just conscious and completely open with no attachments no positions nothing getting to that point it's sort of like a meditative state it's a very present state of mind empty mind what does then folks would call no mind getting to that is what I want you to try to experiment with that will be one of your homework assignments from this episode because you need to not just listen to me talking bad about ideology you need to actually within your direct experience feel the distinction between being ideological and not like really not by dropping a lot of this stuff and to to feel what that feels like that's very important for you to hit that point that's an experiential thing you can't just believe me on you got to do it notice that any sage any really high quality teacher will always try to steer their students away from ideology in the manner in which they teach their entire teaching style will be such that they're trying to get you away from ideology trying not to fill your mind with beliefs trying to not have you blindly believing in what they're saying and that's what the greatest spiritual sages and teachers do they try not to tell you the answers which is something I'm kind of bad at because I like to give you all the answers so you've got to be extra careful with me because a lot of people easily confuse the things that I teach with ideology and that's just because I sort of just pummel you with answers but these answers are coming a lot of times from my own direct experiences and my own contemplations stuff that I've worked on for years for decades sometimes and so yeah you can easily turn it into an ideology if you're not careful enlightened masters and sages are really really good they're masterful at being able to steer students away from ideology precisely because ideology is the greatest obstacle to awakening to consciousness consciousness is inversely proportional to ideology and also be careful not to confuse being non ideological as me saying that you need to be some lukewarm moderate milk-toast position taker who just takes the average or middle of every position as though you have no strong opinions on anything and that you could take it this way or that way doesn't matter it's like is global warming true or is it not true well let's just what the difference or it's like is our neo-nazis correct or are the social justice warriors correct oh well let's just take the that the midway point no that's not what I'm saying at all Sage's can have strong opinions and strong positions on things and in fact sages are more radical in their understanding of reality than ideologues in many cases they have some radical positions but the difference is that they're detached and they're cool and they're not doing it from a position of creating an identity out of it that's the key you see not in the content the key is are you creating an identity out of it are you attached to it it might sound like what I'm telling you with all this is that everything is relative and that there is no such thing as the absolute truth because after all Leo if you start talking about the absolute doesn't that make you an ideologue and here's where it's really ironic and paradoxical is that there is an absolute truth and you can access it and have it and know it and be it but it's so different than what the ideologue thinks the absolute is that it's not even in the same ballpark and that it has nothing to do with ideology whatsoever and that it's not even within the domain of the mind it's a totally different thing this thing that I'm calling the absolute this is this is something that you can't even imagine is possible it's completely outside the realm of your reality and it has nothing to do with beliefs or with ideology so sometimes people hear me talking about the absolute or the truth with a capital T and they'll say all that mean leo is an ideologue because Leo thinks he's got the absolute and that's just a conflation that's a surface similarity that's a similarity in words to really experience the actual absolute that's a life-changing thing and it's got nothing to do with ideology and once you experience that you'll know what it is and you'll know why it is the way I say it is and until then you won't understand and until then you're very likely to confuse it with ideology which is why enlightened masters and sages tend to not talk about enlightenment or tell you what the absolute is they prefer to say silent because they know you'll just confuse it for ideology and you'll turn it into ideology so let's answer some frequently asked questions is non duality and ideology and the answer is no it's not but you can easily turn it into an ideology and certainly many people throughout history have done exactly that in fact that's what all religion is religion is what you get when you turn idea non-duality into an ideology and it's a it's a very common trap it's very easy to commit this trap even if you think you're not committing it you're still probably gonna come in it many many times in your life so just watch out but non-duality itself is absolute it's the ultimate truth it is what's actually happening right now as I'm standing here and talking to you is non duality non-duality is the case it's always the case there's no alternative to non duality it's the one and only way reality is but that's not an ideology that's not something you believe that's something that is actually happening right now that you're either conscious of or you're not so non duality is about your level of consciousness not about what you think or believe you could have a broken brain such that you're not able to think anymore or believe or even remember any memories or even have a sense of self and so you won't have an ideology at that point but non-duality will still be the case if you're conscious of it the next question is is actualized organ ideology and the answer also is it's not intended to be and I am I way to talk about all these epistemic topics which are very nerdy complicated lengthy philosophical sounding they bore people they turn people off they cost me subscribers I go out of my way to talk about it precisely because if I don't the danger is you'll fall into turning actualized I don't work into an ideology so nothing I say should be taken on faith nothing I say should just be blindly believed you can believe it tentatively for the sake of going out there and then verifying it for yourself so you shouldn't actively try to disbelieve me on everything like some skeptics try to do because that would be counterproductive but you do need to verify you do need to contemplate for yourself think through it go read other sources lives and other teachers hundreds of sources experience radical things go do psychedelics go do this go do that go meditate go go on retreats you know do all this stuff so that what I'm teaching you doesn't turn into an ideology because if all you're doing is you're sitting there watching these every week and you're taking no action and not doing even half the stuff that I say then it will become an ideology for you and therefore you will you will shoot yourself in the foot and more than just shooting yourself in the foot you will then spread that ideology because the ideology is not gonna stop with you you will spread your version of actualized ideology to other people and you will infect their minds with your own misconceptions and delusions because you're lazy and you don't wanna do any work you'll do that and then they'll do that to other people and then you'll turn this into a religion and that's how religion starts another question Leo how is science an ideology you keep alluding to this idea that science is somehow an ideology but how can this be the case isn't science the opposite of an ideology and I'm not gonna answer that here because that's a super in-depth question I'm gonna have episodes in the future that address the nature of science and problems within science and how science is an ideology but for now I'll just leave it to you sit down with a notebook and contemplate how is science and ideology and if you're open-minded and you really want to know the answer through that contemplation process you will discover many profound answer to that question which I will also reiterate in my future episodes another question Leo what do I do if I discover that I have an ideology how do I get rid of it and the answer that is to deconstruct it so to get rid of an ideology gotta sit down with a pad of paper and some pencil or pen and question it to death question all the assumptions question why you need it why you have it where it came from what function is serving in your life why you think it's true question question question question I don't care what ideology it is if you question it enough you will eventually discover that it's false because that's what all ideologies are they're all false they're all disowning some part of reality they're all serving some sort of hidden egoic agenda but you know it can take you a while to discover that I don't think you're gonna figure that out in ten minutes you might need to do years of of this sort of work of deconstruction you know to deconstruct such an ideology as materialist science or you know if you were raised a Catholic or a Mormon you know it'll take you years to deconstruct that but hey you can start right now you know you can still do a lot of work just in 30 minutes of contemplating so don't be afraid to to crack in and start to question all the stuff that you were taught here's the cool thing about truth is that you never have to worry about truth being damaged by questioning you can question until you're blue in the face and you will never offend or damage the truth or threaten the truth you'll only get closer and the only things that you will discard through this questioning process is falsehood so you really have nothing to lose other than your entire identity and your entire sense of reality if it happens to not be true which you know who knows maybe that turns out to be the case another question Leo how do I change somebody else's ideology I have a friend or spouse or child or somebody or my parents who are very ideological and I want to change them well this is tricky very tricky very tricky problem if someone has a strong ideology and they're closed-minded and they don't want to question which of course is gonna tend to be the case because that's why they have the ideology in the first place is because they don't want to experience new stuff they don't want to see new perspectives it's gonna be very difficult for you to change their ideology and basically you can't the person has to want to so be careful about going around and bashing people for being ideologues and getting them to change cuz what you'll actually do is you'll make them a defensive you'll make them attack you if you try to attack them or try to question them too much so you got to find a person who's at the point in their life where they're open-minded enough that they're they're willing to explore new perspectives and if you can get into that to that point or if they're already there rather then then you have to try to expose them to new perspectives so like see maybe maybe your your spouse or your parents or your coworker or somebody who you want to open their mind you know maybe go try to do some ayahuasca retreat with them and see will they go with you are they open to that idea and if they are then yeah do that with them help them through that process make it as comfortable as you can make it for them so they don't freak out and you know encourage them to do it so that they think that they have some companionship and some camaraderie from you and then if they do it then that will blow their whole reality open now of course you know how most people probably aren't ready for an ayahuasca thing but um you know just even by introducing books some of the books I have on my book list you can you can give those out to people for Christmas presents birthday presents you know as long as they're open-minded enough and those books one of those books can change someone's entire life if you give it to them at the right time and if they're ready for it you know of course sharing my videos or sharing other people's videos who talk about similar things getting people to travel to new places new parts of the world places that are very different culturally and they've experienced that starts to open people up so just starting to introduce them to new ideas by having conversations with them books psychedelics travel go to a workshop or a retreat in your area go to a meditation retreat you have a pasta or treat together there's all sorts of opportunities here introduce them to spiral dynamics that can be a powerful model to help open people up so you got a lot to work with but they do have to be open mind and like I say there's there's no cure for closed mindedness a close minded person is is a goner like if they're really close minded they're a goner and can't help them it's sort of like they've uh they've been they've been bitten by a zombie and there's no there's no cure so as I'm wrapping up here let me just conclude and tie all this together by saying that we live in polarizing times forces right now are trying to polarize you in the political domain in the social domain and the cultural domain and in many other domains and you need to be wise enough not to let them you need to be able to see through this whole ideological game that's being played with in our culture and society and especially on the internet - there's a lot of this polarization going on in the internet don't believe anyone who demonizes other people that's an immediate red flag highly conscious people will almost never ever demonize scapegoat or blame anyone that's Anathem unto consciousness low consciousness people behave that way do not let anyone distract you with all this nonsense all these culture Wars all these lesser jihads from your own inner work from you sitting down and devoting the time to contemplate to meditate to self-reflect make sure that you make a distinction between ideological teachers and teachings and non-ideological teachers and teachings and stay away from the ideological ones or at the very least if you do partake in them are taking it lightly don't take it too seriously and be careful with letting them radicalize you because oftentimes you find a seductive ideology which fits in with some deficiency need that you have or you just get some emotional reward from listening to somebody on somebody else or demonize somebody else some other culture some other group of people or some other politician or whatever you get a you get a kick out of that so you just keep watching and listening and listening and you go down this rabbit hole and after a few years of that you've become like them they've turned you into an ideological zombie also be sure you understand that just because someone has the air of scientific talk about them that does not mean that they're not pushing an ideology just because someone sounds rational or just because someone is secular that does not mean they're not pushing some ideology on you secular ideologies are some of the most subtle and sneaky forms of ideology and science is something that ideologues love to use to justify whatever ideology they've got makes it seem very legit also I want you to notice that an ideological person has a certain demeanor about them they have a certain energy they have a certain way that they talk they they make certain mannerisms and certain expressions there's certain things that they do that they can't help because they're an ideologue so look for those by studying ideological people look for those red flags and get really good training your filters for spotting that and also very importantly train yourself to spot ideology as it arises within you so what you'll notice if you become mindful and start to pay more attention to your own body and to your own psyche you'll feel yourself becoming ideological about certain issues at certain times and then you feel the emotions that arise within you emotions of wanting to lash out to attack to blame to criticize to demonize or to get defensive and get protective or get scared when somebody questions you or in a debate someone makes some point that makes you fearful of being wrong stuff like that used to feel that on the inside and that shows you that oh yeah that's that's my ideology that's something I got a deconstruct so learn to feel it develop awareness over that and just remember that the number-one rule of life again is do not be ideological and now we're done with this episode but I have some homework assignments for you firstly I want you to contemplate using a journal from scratch ignoring everything I've said here what is ideology what is the purpose of ideology why does ideology exist and how am i ideological by wish of course I don't mean me I mean you how are you ideological that's gonna be your homework for the next week go deep on it contemplate from scratch isolate yourself in a bubble from all the stuff that I told you here today and then a week later you can come and compare to come back and compare your answers to my answers and see what you got right and wrong and so forth and and also lastly what I have for you is actually have a worksheet with a lot of civic questions that will help you to take your contemplation deeper asking all sorts of questions about how to suss out your own ideologies that are subtle ones so go download the free worksheet click on the link down below you'll find it there and work on that worksheet as you also do this contemplation in your journal and that's it for this episode all-righty please click that like button for me don't forget and come check out actualize that org that's my website I've got resources there for you that are exclusive and potentially life-changing from the stuff that I post on my blog to the forum where you can interact with people and get a sense of belonging if you need that for support the life purpose course the book list which has a lot of books that will open your mind and maybe open the minds of many of your friends and colleagues and family members and so forth and the last thing that I'll just end on here is remember that actualize that or cannot work without contemplation our whole project here of turning you into a sage making you more conscious and explaining all these diverse topics that I talked about this whole project of personal development cannot work unless you're gonna contemplate these things that I talked about for yourself from scratch and derive the answers and to see the logic of it and to see why the things I say are true or maybe to discover that certain things I say aren't true contemplation is required so start developing that habit in the future I'm going to be basically ending every single episode by telling you to contemplate the stuff that I talked about and giving you various questions and if you're not developing this habit then you're not gonna be doing these assignments and you're gonna lose the majority of the value from these episodes and the last thing that I'll tell you about is this little resource that I'm going to create on the forum we're gonna create a mega thread of examples of ideology that are found in the media and through YouTube videos so we're gonna have all sorts of ideologies religious ones secular one rationalist ones atheist ones will post a bunch of them there'll be hundreds of videos there in the end so that will be sort of like a case study in ideology you can come there and look at those study those and to see you know how is the stuff that I'm talking about expressed today right now in the 21st century and our political climate all the stuff that's happening all around us and you'll see live examples of that it's really fun to look at those and you can contribute your own examples so for a link to that check down below and there will be a link to the mega threat you