Ideologues

An ideologue is a member of a particular kind of endogroup, one whose exceptional myth is built out of ideas rather than out of ancestry, territory or wealth. The structure is unchanged. There is still an endo-ideal, still a negative image, still glorification of the group and demonization of everyone outside it, and the ideas simply supply the material the myth is made from. This is why Marsh's definition allows two sources, ideas attributed to the group and ideas the group adheres to, since a myth works equally well whether the group actually holds the position or is merely credited with it. Her definition of ideology shows why ideas make such serviceable myth material. An ideology is a set of ideas neither complete nor consistent enough to qualify as a philosophy, existing within endorealities and often used to create them, lacking consistent principles and usually highly mutable. Mutability is the useful property. A body of ideas that can be revised at need will not embarrass the group it belongs to, which is exactly what an exceptional myth requires. She names psychology and economics as ideologies on these grounds. The practical consequence for anyone trying to argue with an ideologue is that the ideas are not the attachment. Disproving a position leaves the endogroup intact and the myth simply relocates, since its purpose is its function rather than its meaning.

Ideologue is ordinarily a pejorative for someone rigidly attached to a doctrine, and the academic literature on ideology runs from Marx's false consciousness through Mannheim's sociology of knowledge to Michael Freeden's morphological analysis of ideologies as configurations of contested concepts. Political psychology studies ideological rigidity and motivated reasoning empirically. Almost all of this treats the ideas as the object of attachment and asks why people hold them so firmly. Marsh inverts the question, since on her account the attachment is to the endogroup and the ideas are its uniform, which predicts the flexibility that the rigidity literature has difficulty accounting for.