Ideology attempts to rationalize or excuse evil under the mantle of some respectable, fashionable idea endorsed by the intellectual elite who assume that educated man is a god who brings enlightenment to a dark, bigoted world.

The Art of Living: Ideology and Wisdom

By Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D.

In the famous story about Procrustes’ bed, a cruel tyrant tortures his victims by stretching their legs if they are too short to fit the bed he has constructed, or he cuts off the long legs of his captives to fit the size of the bed. The legs must adjust to the bed; the bed is not made to accommodate the length of the legs. Man does not have to respect or conform to nature; nature must be distorted to fit man’s pre-constructed bed. This tale illuminates the difference between wisdom and ideology—men forming beds or ideas that respect self-evident truths or building beds or theories that deny reality.

Whereas wisdom accepts the “giveneness” of things as long or short and formulates the truth based on the nature of the real, ideology tortures, twists, exaggerates, or diminishes the truth to accommodate a pre-fabricated ideology invented by man’s mind. The fullness of truth in all the richness of being must be reduced to the narrowness of a small mind. Reality, human nature, and moral law must be changed to adapt to an untested man-made concept not based on past experience, the accumulated wisdom of the human race, or venerable traditions. Rather than surrender or accept the obvious truths that inhere in “the nature of things” as they are, have been, and always will be, ideology deconstructs traditional norms, ancient truths, and moral ideals. It reinvents truth in the form of a self-serving theory with some political agenda.

Feminist ideology, for example, rejects the intrinsic nature of manhood and womanhood as God-given and complementary. A male nature and a female nature are called arbitrary “artificial constructs,” the by-products of prejudice or ignorance. The words “mother” and “father” are interchangeable and equal and carry no fixed meaning. The meaning of a family is subject to redefinition by the United Nations, for it states that a family assumes “a plurality of forms.”A child can have two mothers or two fathers because there is no unchanging “nature” that deserves recognition. Ideology, then, refuses to acknowledge that all created things—planets, water, dogs, God, man, or woman–possess an inborn nature or bent that inclines them to move or act in a particular way for a specific purpose. Just as fire rises up and water flows down and planets have orbits, man and woman also have natural movements that direct them to an end that is God-given. The nature of something orients its direction and orders its motion for some intelligible purpose that serves a wise design.

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