Beyond Ideological Fixation

People's worldview or their approach or orientedness to life is largely ideologically determined or that may be an evolved ideology by itself. People may be indoctrinated into an ideology or they might have been in it through generations as an evolutionary process. People may be lethargic or fearful of thinking afresh and thus ideologies exist inevitably as fixities.

Settled ideologies serve people to their comfort. Disturbing stability may not surpass the troubles it may cause in terms of the benefits it may reap. Therefore, the rational path is a piecemeal approach to social good. However, a piecemeal approach requires extraordinary philosophical minds in action. The challenge remains; how to get those extraordinary minds and bring them into action. What we can do is to make people realise that they see things through ideological lenses and reality may vary. And, an unjust order helps none. If this somehow gets into our operative epistemology, we may at least have the chance of having people more capable of seeing things as they are.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Systemic Knowledge

Well-integrated knowledge systems must replace ideologies. People must not subject themselves to the fancies of out-of-the-world thinking mavericks. Collaborative philosophizing and research projects must go into piecemeal calibrating of the working systems. A functional system results in people living free of want, fear, and indignities. Any good system or improvisation begins showing results from day one.

 
Multiple and multifaceted claims of what constitutes good often mislead people. For that people must be aware of this, one's personal and public good are intertwined. Social good is the ecology which alone can ensure personal excellence and, on the other end, individual people's endeavour for excellence betters the ecology. By excellence, I do not mean extraordinariness. The pursuit of extraordinariness is pathological.

 

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Western Ideological Trap

Though tattered, early-twentieth-century European-originated ideologies continue to trap academic imagination in our country, and more ironically, any of these ideologies cuts across desi ideological divides. For example, European leftism informs both our left and right consciousness. People here hardly realise that these ideologies in secular cover were mechanisms for their respective ethnic chauvinism or supremacy as per their cultural values. We fail to differentiate between the purpose and method parts of their design. The sciences of learning and doing, rather than what they were doing, are relevant to us, and that too to an extent. This great lacuna of not differentiating between those two is hindering the realisation of our worth.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Ideology

 Ideology is manufactured and meant to be a modular systemic idea. Modelled as perfection, it seeks to replace an operating political model and culture. In its attempt, it confronts and seeks to destroy evolving and organic ideas guiding human life. A thinking person must avoid grandness and be humble and alive to life, i.e, they must be always conscious that any human being is not a piece or a block but a feeling and sensitive being.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Theology and Ideology

Ideology was coined to mean the science of ideas but it came to signify normative ordering of life to attain and to maintain it once it is attained. However, it hardly differed from theology except it abandoned the reference to the heavens. In other words, ideology is theology without God, and theology is an ideology with God.

However, this understanding of the nature of doctrines does not cover liberalism and conservatism, and also Gandhism, which contains the aspects of both and more. The fact, as I consider it, is that these are not ideologies. These are theorisations of life as it exists, unfolds, and of its necessities. These explore possibilities in place of reducing life to some preconceived state.

Now, I come to a fundamental trait of ideology/theology, and it is that these invoke equality as its prime thesis. And, in the process of their ideational or actual realisation, these end up arresting life to an imagined doctrine and disallowing the fullness of life. And, even a remote realisation of its proposed state brings in greater inequality with a cruel regime enforcing it. If life is allowed its naturalness with collective interventions to bare necessities, the people enjoy better human egalitarian ethos with all the freedoms making life worth living.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Ideology

Ideologies restrict, but these conduce life. Present times cry for some new ideologies, as the old ones are now abysmally dated. The ancient Indic wisdom may help in a better recasting of the body of ideas for guiding life. Though its binaries-free envisioning and its knowledge of reality as ever-unfolding are not compatible with ideologisation, the perspective would help any ideological venture for making it more flexible and accommodative and serve the human cause better.

 

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Ideological Peril

Ideologies, no matter how crude or sophisticated they may be, give credibility to our existential phantasies. And this is their anavoidable charm and we try to buttress those wild thoughts with our agency and material constructions. Overall, these deny reality, degrade real human beings, distort our agency, and make our life more miserable than the original from which we wanted to escape. 

Niraj Kumar Jha