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A Sense of Idea

When I was discussing with my friends the other day about rationalist vs religious ideology, it occurred to me that we cannot understand the world using single ideology. Any ideology is incomplete by nature. Be it the objective reality, advithic vethanta, capitalistic, communistic, pragmatic, utilitarian ideologies they are all ideal form of a specific world view. You can only strive for the best possible world view by contrasting and debating multiple and opposing ideals. It is analogues to how our senses help us perceive the world. No individual sense can provide full information about the world. The eye tells us that the world is a shifting shapes of colors, the touch tells us that the world is made of soft and rigid objects, the ear tells us that the world is varying amplitudes of vibration. We construct the model of the world inside our mind using this multiple incomplete and tangential information. This constructed model may not be the perfect representation of the real world but the closest that we can get, given the limits of our senses. But the most important limiting factor in understanding the world is our mind itself.

Mind evolved to provide a coherent narrative of the world around us by picking and simplifying from the myriad of information that is constantly flooding through our senses. Given the vastness of this information, it is understandable that the mind often ends up taking shortcuts, finding approximations and falling into fallacies. Our persistent search for an unified theory is the cry of our mind about its inability to cope with the complex and pluralistic nature of the world.

Often people argue that only the ideology they subscribed to is correct and everything else is wrong. This is like saying that only the eye shows the correct world so I should mute all my other senses. Eye sometime shows mirages, reflections and virtual images. Only when we contrast that with our touch we get a better perspective. Unifying multiple views, does not increase the perspective but only reduces it. If someone looks for a unified ideology or trying to unify multiple ideologies, he is making the exact same mistake. So it is imperative to keep the ideologies in their pure forms, keep them apart and use multiple of them to validate our beliefs.

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