All things are subject to interpretation whichever
interpretation prevails at a given time is a function
of power and not truth. Friedrich Nietzsche
Casablanca – Ideology is sometimes delineated as a system of beliefs and orientations that guide an individual or a group of people and influence their attitudes and actions. It is also ubiquitous in almost all human practices: religious, political, economic, social, and so forth.
Ideology is almost always juxtaposed to pure truth, in the sense that the former always distorts and blurs the latter, inducing to the degeneracy of people. In this respect, one feels the exigency to ponder the existence of any pure truth in such a world wherein ideology has become an intricate apparatus of dogmatic and delusive ‘pseudo truths,’ with which pure truth conflates, thus losing its authenticity.
Ideology is also propagated via a plethora of instruments. In our own modern times, however, none of these means can transgress the power of media in disseminating a particular ideology among the public. Media has developed sophisticated and well-studied techniques to disguise blatant ideologies into pure and unquestionable truths. The public, on the other side of the sphere, is subjected to series of ‘delusive injections’ from their first contact with media; and since critical thinking is a luxury that not everyone enjoys, or feels the need to, chances are great, hence, that a meaningful spate of the audience unthinkably inhales the underhanded ideology as a factual truth.
What is really threatening about this process of ideology propagation is that one never knows when it starts. It subtly and subliminally encloses itself in one’s conscious, and little by little morphs into one’s own analytic lens, through which he or she perceives and criticizes the world. One might even unwillingly falsify pure truth through these lenses without being aware of that. I might for example judge a piece of information as being fictitious whereas it is not, just because a dogmatic ideology, which I have been fed for a considerable period, has shaped my perception of it. In such cases, we no longer are in pursuit of the truth; we rather ensure to propagate the ideology that we, ourselves, have been indoctrinated as the ‘one ideology,’ the ‘pure truth.’
Critical and analytic thinking proves, for the moment, to be the only exit one should recur to in order to debunk and uncover the camouflaged, dogmatic ideologies, exhibited in the shape of a pure truth. However, it is with one’s own critical thinking that one has to start, and these happen to be the questions everyone should ask in this respect: is it objective critical thinking itself or an injected ideological ‘lens’ one unconsciously adopts to scrutinize the truth? Is our critical thinking a process wherein the underpinnings of a particular issue are rigorously questioned and researched, or is it rather a process through which we assign elusive meanings and attach implications to issues at hand, incited by the ideology that we have been fed earlier, instead of identifying the implications that are already tagged to those issues?
Ultimately, I believe that the pursuit of truth has to start from a question, which in turn branches into an array of interconnected queries that relate to it. When endeavoring to find answers to these questions, one has to calculate all possible answers; when one finds no answer, then a question would fit instead, and vice versa. The pursuit of truth is not the pursuit of an answer; it extends farther than that. It is both an exciting and intimidating venture in which one embarks in search of other questions, other doors, other paths, which, though do not embody the’ truth’, or only hand us fragments of it, still keeps us away from blinding ideologies that lead us astray and deceive us into believing in an easily attainable ‘truth.’
