In today’s social justice ethos, if someone makes a racist or sexist statement, they are called out immediately. Prejudices of any kind are frowned upon. Usually, bigoted people are seen to be blinded by their emotions.

However, emotions aren’t the sole cause of prejudices. Even the intellect, which is normally meant to regulate our emotions and balance our perceptions, can blind us. Such intellectual blinding happens through ideology, specifically, through ideological obsessions. 

When we buy into an ideology, we see the whole world filtered through that ideology. Rather than using the ideology as a tool to make better sense of the world, we reduce the world to that ideology. Whatever doesn’t make sense within that ideology’s framework is neglected or rejected. Or it is explained away through various rationalizations, arguments used to arrive at self-serving conclusions that are often irrational. The Bhagavad-gita (18.22) deems such ideological obsession as knowledge in the mode of ignorance, wherein all of reality is reduced to a fragment. 

Thus, for example, people driven by leftist ideologies presume that anyone wealthy or powerful has become so by exploiting others. They don’t consider the role of talent and commitment in fostering success. When they reduce the world to a struggle between exploiters and exploited, they become blinded to the many common causes for which the poor and wealthy can work synergistically. 

And such blinding is itself ideology-blind; just as leftist ideologies can blind, so can rightist ideologies. 

Doesn’t the Gita also offer an ideology? Not exactly. The Gita offers spirituality and a philosophy that delineates the pathway for spiritualizing our consciousness. When our consciousness is thus raised above both emotional and intellectual blinders, we can then see things as they are. And seeing everyone as essentially spiritual beings is the best way to overcome bigotry. 

 

Think it over:

  • How does ideology blind intellectually?
  • Do you know anyone who is ideologically blinded? Might you yourself be similarly blinded?
  • How is Gita wisdom different from an ideology?

 

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18.22 And that knowledge by which one is attached to one kind of work as the all in all, without knowledge of the truth, and which is very meager, is said to be in the mode of darkness.

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