Ideologies: Understanding Beliefs, Values, and Worldviews

IDEOLOGIES

  • Ideologies are the frameworks through which individuals interpret the world, influencing their values and actions. It answers, "What I believe."

WHAT IS AN IDEOLOGY?

  • Ideology is a system of beliefs that shapes our view of the world.
  • It is the system of thought that tries to explain who we are and how we should live together.
  • It encompasses ideas about what is important in life.
  • It is a set of values formed from exposure to different religious, cultural, scientific, and political ideas.
  • Ideology reflects beliefs about human nature, the purpose of life, and the role of the individual in society.
  • It provides a picture of the world as it is and how it should be.
  • Many of the world's ideologies are based on the values of collectivism and individualism.

BELIEFS AND VALUES

  • Beliefs and values are guided by these questions:
    • What is the meaning of life? Why do we exist?
    • What are humans like (nature of humans)?
    • What is the nature of society?
    • What is the role of individuals in society?
    • What is the role of government in society?
    • What is my role in society?

ALBERTA GOVERNMENT SURPLUS EXAMPLE

  • Issue: How should the Alberta government address a multi-billion dollar surplus?
  • Options:
    1. Invest the extra money in infrastructure projects (e.g., building roads).
    2. Pay off any remaining provincial debts.
    3. Invest the extra money in a savings fund for future generations of Albertans.
    4. Provide each individual Albertan with a $$400$ prosperity cheque.
    5. Invest the extra money in social services (e.g., health care and education).
    6. Lower the amount of income tax collected from each individual Albertan.
    7. Increase the amount of support for Albertans with severe disabilities.
  • Spectrum:
    • A: Concern for the well-being of others in society (Collectivism).
    • B: A compromise between the well-being of the group and of the individual.
    • C: Concern for a person's own individual well-being (Individualism).

INDIVIDUALISM

  • Individualism is based on the belief that:
    • People should act on their own to satisfy personal goals.
    • People will be happiest when they are free to pursue their own goals.
    • Society's welfare will be provided for when individuals take on the responsibility of caring for themselves.
    • Because individuals are self-reliant, government will play a limited role in society.
  • Individualism:
    • People who believe that individual citizens should be primarily concerned with satisfying their own personal interests and needs are expressing a belief in individualism.

KEY PRINCIPLES OF INDIVIDUALISM

  • Individuals are important and entitled to make decisions.
  • Individuals are unique.
  • Individual effort is valued, and each individual should be allowed to develop his or her potential.
  • Individuals have the right to privacy and to think freely.
  • The individual is responsible for his or her own actions.
  • The individual should take initiative and value personal achievements.
  • Competition promotes excellence.
  • The individual is responsible for his or her own welfare.
  • Private property and individual wealth are valued.
  • Laws should protect individual rights.

COLLECTIVISM

  • Collectivism:
    • People who believe that the goals of society should be emphasized and that the goals of the individuals made less important are expressing a belief in collectivism.
  • Collectivism is based on the belief that:
    • People function best by acting as part of a group.
    • People require security and protection to make their lives better.
    • Needs of the people are met by coordinating the resources of society.
    • Government plays an extensive role in society.

KEY PRINCIPLES OF COLLECTIVISM

  • The group, or collective, is important and more valuable than a single individual.
  • It is important to contribute to the group and to be like the group.
  • The strength of the group relies on the contributions of everyone, and the individual may need to sacrifice.
  • The group is stronger if it knows what its members think, and privacy is not a priority.
  • The entire group is responsible for its members' actions.
  • The efforts of the group are most important, and individual efforts may not always be celebrated.
  • Co-operation is the best way to succeed.
  • The group is responsible for its members' welfare.
  • Wealth is shared.
  • The well-being of the group is more important than individual rights.

FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE IDEOLOGIES

  • Culture
  • Language
  • Media
  • Relationship to land
  • Environment
  • Gender
  • Religion, spirituality

CULTURE

  • Culture: the combination of beliefs, customs, practices, and social behaviors of a particular group of people.
  • A shared cultural experience may profoundly influence what ideology an individual or a group chooses to adopt.
  • The experience of living as a minority may emphasize the importance of the individual decision to retain identity, culture, and language.
  • Cultural institutions maintain and protect the heritage and rights of the community’s members.

LANGUAGE

  • Language and culture play an important role in shaping each person and each society’s beliefs and values. A common language and culture often unite people.
  • Ex. Francophone parents in most provinces of Canada have fought for the right to have their children educated in French. These parents know that their children’s loss of the French language would mean the loss of their Francophone identity.
  • Trends: The average person speaks 1.5 languages.

RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY

  • Religion: a formalized set of collectively-held beliefs and practices, linked to social groups and institutions that centres on the worship of and faith in a god or gods that tries to explain human existence and our place in the universe.
  • Spirituality can be closely tied to religion. Spirituality is a way of relating to the soul or the spirit, or perhaps to religious or sacred things rather than worldly things.
  • Many people consider themselves to be spiritual even though they do not follow a formalized religion. Their spirituality may influence how they see the world and can be central to their identities.
  • Many Canadians integrate religious and spiritual beliefs and practices. For example:
    • Some Aboriginal people integrate their traditional spiritual beliefs into Christianity.
    • People’s beliefs and values originate in a religious or spiritual tradition. Many people use religious or spiritual values to decide whether what they believe is good or bad behaviour. – Moral Absolutism

MORALS

  • Morals: the values we hold that define us.
  • We often learn our morals from religious and spiritual upbringing.
  • Moral absolutism holds that good and evil are fixed concepts established by a deity or deities, nature, morality, common sense, or some other source.
  • Amoralism claims that good and evil are meaningless, that there is no moral ingredient in nature.
  • A person can be moral or amoral.
  • Good:
    • ‘Good’ means a lack of self-centredness.
    • It means the ability to empathize with other people, to feel compassion for them, and to put their needs before your own.
    • It means, if necessary, sacrificing your own well-being for the sake of others’.
    • It means benevolence, altruism and selflessness, and self-sacrifice towards a greater cause.
    • Goodness stems from a sense of empathy.
    • It means being able to see beyond the superficial difference of race, gender, or nationality and relate to a common human essence beneath them.
  • It is possible that a person’s beliefs and values may be so strong that if differences of opinion or perspective cannot be resolved, conflict may result.
    • Examples of such conflict can be found in war and religious persecution.
    • Historically, most wars were started over the difference in religion
  • Trends: Currently, younger generations are moving towards spirituality over organized religion. Ideas such as: vibes, karma, wellness, mental health, mindfulness, minimalism and crystals or stones are all examples of spirituality over organized religion.

ENVIRONMENT OR RELATIONSHIP TO LAND

  • The place that we occupy shapes our identity.
  • How we connect to the land and our experiences with our environment determine some of the beliefs and values that shape our identities.
  • If your ancestors have lived in the same area for hundreds of years, your connection to the land is quite different from someone who is a newcomer.
  • The identity of some Aboriginal peoples in Canada is shaped by a spiritual relationship to the land. Traditional Aboriginal practices are dependent on a relationship with the land, and the understanding and respect for the environment.
  • If your livelihood is connected to land or natural resources, this might also have an effect on your beliefs and values. EX. An office worker living in a city might have a different worldview than a farmer.
  • Trends: Arguably, there is currently a trend of returning to nature.

GENDER

  • Gender is a very complicated issue - especially as we learn and discover more about gender and identity in the 21st century.
  • Sex - our biological composition
  • Gender - our preferred expression along the spectrum of masculine and feminine
  • Gender display - the way that we express our gender in relation to the spectrum of masculine and feminine
  • Sometimes society will create laws about what is “appropriate” gender-based behaviour.
  • In different cultures, a gender role can be a set of expected behaviors or personal qualities that a given social group considers acceptable for one of the biological sexes, male or female. This could include a role in the family or a career choice that are acceptable for a man or a woman.
  • To address inequalities and existing gender roles a movement arose called feminism—the organized struggle for the equality of women.
    • Feminism is a movement with various waves in history

MEDIA

  • Media can inform and impact how information and ideas are spread.
    • print media - books, newspapers, and magazines
    • electronic/digital media - social media, radio, television/movies, phones, the Internet, and video games.
  • Media has a strong influence on our beliefs and values.
    • advertising influences what we buy and how we see ourselves.
    • Body image, for instance, could be seen to be heavily influenced by images in media. Magazine models have been criticized for being too thin or portraying an unrealistic body type.
  • “medium is the message”—that the form of a communication was more important than the communication’s actual content.

IDEOLOGY

  • Beliefs and values evolve as philosophers challenge old ways of thinking and common beliefs.
  • Sometimes people begin political movements that influence groups’ and individuals’ beliefs and values.
  • Throughout history, people have acted on their collective or individual beliefs and values.
  • Acting on beliefs and values does not have to involve revolution or armed conflict.
  • People can move or be moved to protect their values, rather than change because of the collective.
  • Individuals or small groups of individuals can stand up to their government when it does not recognize the rights of their group.

THEMES OF IDEOLOGY

  • Ideologies are systems of thought that try to explain:
    • how the social world works
    • how we should live together
    • how we should treat one another
    • why we should or should not care about each other
  • Agreed upon language:
    • Nation- a group with a unifying factor of nationalism
    • Religion- may pertain to certain beliefs, values, ethics and morality. May or may not play a major role in people’s lives.
    • Class- the way society is structured, usually based on occupations or the amount of money people have. – Rich, working, poor class-
    • Relationship to the Land & Environment- is expressed both philosophically and practically. That is, in how we live in, interact with, and develop our environment. Even something like recycling.

FOCUS OF IDEOLOGIES

  • All ideologies try to explain the following
    • interpretations of history
    • beliefs about human nature
    • beliefs about society
    • visions for the future

INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY

  • History is the story of past events and how society was.
  • The past is interpreted differently based on beliefs and values.
  • People who share an ideology are likely to interpret the past in a similar way.
  • A nation interprets its history, and then their interpretation becomes part of the nation’s ideology. Interpretations of history are seen as acts of patriotism in which citizens celebrate their history as a group and share it with others.
  • A common interpretation of history is the belief that human beings are progressing and improving over time.
  • Some people question the notion of progress and view our technological advances as having negative consequences.

BELIEFS ABOUT HUMAN NATURE

  • History and modern society is full of cases of inhumanity, and violence toward others.
  • All people and groups act based on their ideologies, whether consciously or unconsciously.
  • An ideology attempts to answer the questions “What are humans like?” and “What should society be like?”

BELIEFS ABOUT SOCIETY

  • Societies are built on the principles of peace and goodwill, while others are built on tyranny and fear.
  • Ideologies are the foundations on which all societies are structured, for good or bad, because ideologies are ways of understanding how we should interact with one another.
  • Should we be individualist or collectivist?
  • Ideologies are based on Values and Beliefs
    • Values: the ideas and understanding that people hold to be important or fundamental to who they are as individuals or as members of a group, often influenced by such things as one’s culture, language, religion, and gender.
    • Beliefs: The ideas and understandings that a person holds to be true, often influenced by such things as one’s culture, language, religion, gender, and worldview.

COLLECTIVISM VS INDIVIDUALISM

  • Collectivism: An ideology that places the needs and goals of the collective or group, before those of any individual member of the group, and is based on a belief in the interdependence of human society
    • THE WELL-BEING OF THE GROUP IS MOST IMPORTANT
  • Individualism: An ideology that places the needs and goals the individual before those of the collective or society - this is based on competition or individual passions
    • INDIVIDUAL CHOICE AND FREEDOM ARE MOST IMPORTANT

THE IDEOLOGICAL SPECTRUM

  • Sometimes it’s easier to categorize ideologies based on a spectrum
  • In its most simplest form, a spectrum will again be broken up into individualism and collectivism
  • It is a diagram on which ideologies can be organized according to a particular set of criteria, such as the extent to which they emphasize collectivism or individualism, which appear on opposite ends of the spectrum
  • Ideological spectrums usually focus on economic and political ideologies.

ECONOMIC STRUCTURES IN SOCIETY

  • AN ECONOMIC SYSTEM:
    • Is the organized way in which decisions are made about how resources will be used in a society
    • is an organized model for decision making about allocation of resources
    • includes basic resources of the economy
    • includes unlimited demands made for the limited supply of resources
    • includes choices that must be made because of scarcity of resources
    • decides what products will be produced
    • decides how products will be produced
    • decides how products will be distributed

TYPES OF ECONOMIC SYSTEMS

  • planned economies
    • Government makes most decisions and places stress on the goals of society
  • mixed economies
    • attempt to balance the goals of society and the goals of the individual in making any decisions
  • market economies
    • leave all economic decisions up to the individual company and individual consumers

ECONOMIC SYSTEMS ON THE SPECTRUM

  • Economic systems are usually thought of in terms of whether they are collectivist (communism), or individualist (capitalism).

CAPITALISM VS. COMMUNISM

  • Capitalism
    • An economic system based on free markets, fair competition, wise consumers, and profit-motivated producers in which a minimum of government involvement is favoured.
    • Based on the idea of supply and demand
  • Communism
    • An ideology based on becoming a classless society in which property is owned by the community and all people share in the production of goods and in the benefits of production.
      This was the hope of the French Revolution.

POLITICAL STRUCTURES IN SOCIETY

  • A POLITICAL SYSTEM:
    • is the organized in a way to make decisions about the issues that face society
    • includes:
      • the political leaders and decision makers
      • a process for making political decisions
      • political institutions
      • a political culture
      • the citizens who make decisions

TYPES OF POLITICAL SYSTEMS

  • Dictatorship
    • A form of government in which one person or a small group possesses absolute power.
    • Dictators, who are not accountable to the citizens over whom they rule, often use force or fraud to gain political power, which they maintain through intimidation, terror, the repression of civil liberties, and propaganda
  • Democracy
    • A political system in which the people have the power to make or influence government decisions directly or indirectly through such processes as free elections

POLITICAL SYSTEMS ON A SPECTRUM

  • Political spectums usually deal with more complex and mixed situations.

HOW DO WE TALK ABOUT THE SPECTRUMS?

  • Left Wing – believes in cooperating in order to promote equality
    • Far Left: radical revolutionary - believes violence is justified to create a more equal society
  • Moderate (center) would support some reform of existing political and economic systems
  • Right Wing – believes that competition and individual success makes for a better society
    • Far Right: reactionary - extremist who is willing to use violence to return to traditional values

IDEOLOGY AND THE SPECTRUM

  • An ideology is based on a set of accepted beliefs about the nature of man, an interpretation of our past, a vision of the future and the role of government in society.
    • On the far left, radical Communists believe in creating a society based on equality.
    • Moderate socialists seek equality and social justice through the power of the state.
    • Liberals desire the greatest amount of freedom for individuals within a state that exercises its powers in the interests of the common good .
    • Conservatives defend the importance of tradition, the stability of the status quo and the privileges of economic success.
    • On the far right, reactionary Fascists believe that abilities are inherited, race is a determinant to success, and equality is impossible and undesirable.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

  • Most ideologies include a vision of what the world should be like in the future, based on the beliefs and values of the ideology.
  • Ex. French Revolution – liberal thinkers saw a future in which power was taken from the king and the church and given to the people.
    • Revolutionaries envisioned a future society in which people were free to travel, speak, and practice religion as they chose, and play a role in how society was governed.