Ideologies: The Prisons of Modern People

Abstract

Ideologies are dogmatic worldviews and make their supporters exclusivists, fanatics and discriminatory. Ideologies are strong and hardly changeable personal views which are lack of factual knowledge and for that aspect they cannot be criticized and questioned by their adherents. Ideologies get their power from enthusiasm not from their suitability to facts to scientific facts. Because of that, ideologies also make harder understanding and grasping universal human values and rights. Ideologies can be seen as prisons of mind. As Cemil Meric-a contemporary Turkish thinker-says, ideologies are the straitjacket of minds. Indeed this metaphor is fitting the situation exactly. Ideologies eclipsed the human reasoning. In this paper I will try to analyze and evaluate the epistemological structure of ideologies and try to give reasons of why they are prisons of human mind and modern people.