There are two major world events happening right now which require opposing action from those involved to achieve their goals. The COVID-19 pandemic requires people to self-isolate and stay at home in order to prevent the virus from spreading. The Black Lives Matter protests demand people pack together on the streets in opposition to the continued existence of racism in Western societies.
Though the actions demanded by each event are in direct conflict with other, the spread of COVID-19 has highlighted how similarly viruses and ideologies propagate in our hyper-connected, politically polarised society. In Christopher Nolan's film, Inception, the protagonist, Cobb, is charged with entering a target's mind and implanting an idea in order to affect behavioural change in the real world. In order to make the idea stick, they dig deep into their target's subconscious for a point of personal vulnerability where, upon awakening, the target cannot dismiss the idea as a passing thought because it has been made intrinsic to his sense of self.
What Cobb is doing is a form of ideological infection. Like a virus, he is entering a person's body and changing its conditions to better suit himself and his ability to travel in the real world (admittedly, I'm being facetiously over-literal with the last part: in the film, Cobb's incentive to complete his mission is the opportunity to return to America and see his children). However, the manner is which he does this is like that of an ideology. The contagion he is spreading is not physical, but mental. The conditions he changes are in the subject's mind, planting an idea in the hope that it self-replicates in the real world.
The only goal of a virus is to spread. It is not conscious or rational, does not make tactics, have terms or negotiate. It simply does what it needs to do to survive and adapts to any attempts to combat it along the way. Since the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and social media, ideologies have increasingly adopted these characteristics, becoming less about philosophy and ideas and instead about multiplying, adapting and surviving.
These characteristics have always formed some part of the concept of ideology, of course: an ideology which cannot spread cannot gather the strength to be heard or put its ideas into action, thus making them redundant. Ideologies are also not inherently a bad thing, in fact all civilised societies are built on them. The existence of laws makes up an ideology. When the people of a society collectively agrees not to murder each other and that those who do should face consequences, we are buying into a systematically mandated way of living. A just society is one which recognises that its ideological roots cannot be absolute, however, being flexible enough in its beliefs to allow it to be challenged and potentially altered.
Having a strong belief in the value of one's ideology is also important not only for creating social cohesion, but also weeding out weak or dishonest challenges and being able to hold together certain fundamental principles even when changing circumstances require the rules governing them to change. It is when ideologies slip into absolutism, or dogma, that they begin to take on the characteristics of a virus. Ideologies have to be able to negotiate and compromise in order to better serve their societies. When they cannot, like viruses they become about nothing more than survival and multiplication, attacking anyone or anything which threatens their integrity, even at the cost of their host.
Having a strong belief in the value of one's ideology is also important not only for creating social cohesion, but also weeding out weak or dishonest challenges and being able to hold together certain fundamental principles even when changing circumstances require the rules governing them to change. It is when ideologies slip into absolutism, or dogma, that they begin to take on the characteristics of a virus. Ideologies have to be able to negotiate and compromise in order to better serve their societies. When they cannot, like viruses they become about nothing more than survival and multiplication, attacking anyone or anything which threatens their integrity, even at the cost of their host.
Ideological contagion on the right has over the past decade most often manifested through the conspiratorial scaremongering of outlets like Fox News, resulting in beliefs that President Barack Obama was not a real American (somewhat ironically, as Republican Ted Cruz's 2016 Presidential bid might have actually been illegitimate due to his Canadian birth), in 'ironic' far-right racism and most recently, that wearing masks to stop the spread of COVID-19 is a liberal attack on personal freedom. The ideological infection of the left, meanwhile, has manifested through equating all inequality with prejudice, denial of human sexual dimorphism and a steadfast belief that the world is getting worse on the issues it purports to oppose (racism, sexism, poverty, etc) when all the data suggests rapid and widespread improvement.
What is common among the conspiracy theories and denialism of the right and left is that neither are actually about ideas or improving society, but instead about ensuring the survival of their ideological 'side'. There is no rational reason for the Republican right to oppose wearing masks to stop the spread of COVID-19 in the US - quite the opposite, in fact, as Republican voters are typically older and more vulnerable to the virus - or believe that it represents a serious threat to their freedom. The position has been adopted because the left (or 'the libs') have advocated for masks and thus, by wearing them, the ideology of the right would be perceived to be ceding ground. In the UK, the Black Lives Matter movement has adopted wholesale the language and slogans of the American movement despite racism taking entirely different forms in each country. It is not about 'black lives', but spreading an ideological position irrespective of reality. The Premier League's whole-hearted endorsement of the organisation recently backfired after BLM UK posted an anti-semitic tweet.
(In the US, the right's defence of horrendous recordings of police brutality and the left's defence of protestor violence and denial of BLM's history with anti-semitism and far-left policies are further displays of ideological infection over the same issue.)
(In the US, the right's defence of horrendous recordings of police brutality and the left's defence of protestor violence and denial of BLM's history with anti-semitism and far-left policies are further displays of ideological infection over the same issue.)
Where COVID-19 spreads (largely) through orally-transmitted droplets, absolutist ideologies spread through word-of-mouth. Where COVID is most dangerous to the elderly and those with respiratory vulnerabilities, those ideologies pray on psychological vulnerabilities in the young and abused to gain a mental foothold from where it can seed more extreme positions. With social media amplifying the loudest and most extreme voices, and the internet providing an infinite supply of data to conform or refute any possible position, the purpose of political ideologies has mutated from communicating ideas to being about nothing more than transmitting themselves at any cost. We are presently in the midst of two pandemics, one attacking humanity's body, the other its soul, each feeding off the other. Neither must be allowed to spread any further.
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