“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles… He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
— Miss Hardcastle, in C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
There is a particular kind of danger that is dressed as progress the same way that the proverbial Emperor dressed in his new “clothes”. It comes with academic credentials. It speaks in the cadences of compassion. It hits the dopamine highs of altruism in the brain of its host, who cannot, for the life of him, identify his own fatal flaw. We forget that the Emperor’s new clothes were peer reviewed!
Our greatest collective danger is not ignorance. It is the moment our ideals become more valuable than our morals.
Morals are relational—they exist in the encounter between people, in the face of the other, in the irreducible second-person moment of you. Ideologies are directional—abstractions derived from moral concern, but not morals themselves. They’re useful for navigation, but dangerous as destinations, stars to steer by, not gods to worship. The moment an ideal demands a human offering, it has become an idol.
How the Inversion Happens
No one wakes up deciding that their ideology matters more than people, they have to be educated into that conclusion. The inversion happens gradually—12 years usually—through a sequence of small rationalizations: this person is an obstacle to the greater good. Each step seems reasonable. The logic runs itself. And because the altruism signal fires throughout, the perpetrator never registers what he has become. He feels, in fact, morally superior—which is the most dangerous feeling available to a human being.
Pride used to come before a fall, our postmodern ideologies now demand that it comes at the end of the spring.
What makes this corruption self-sealing is precisely the feel-good hormone of ideological virtue. Genuine altruism is generated in direct encounter—I see this person suffering and respond, my left hand not virtue signaling the actions of my right hand. Ideological altruism is generated abstractly—I serve the cause which theoretically benefits persons I will never meet, whose particularity never rudely interrupts my reasoning. The same neurological reward, completely decoupled from the moral reality that originally produced it.
Dostoevsky understood this. So did Flannery O’Connor. The idealist who commits atrocity usually has far less guilt than the moral man who fails personally—because the idealist’s accounting system has been restructured so that harm he does registers to him as credit. Intentions matter to him far more than actual outcomes, and ideological ends always justify ideological means. His victim cannot speak back into the system; that is not a design flaw, it is the design. They are to be canceled.
The Epistemological Root
The problem begins upstream, at the level of knowledge itself. When we teach that only science is truly empirical—that only the measurable, the replicable, the publicly verifiable counts as real knowing—we quietly decommission the very faculty by which moral knowledge is possible, indeed by which all knowledge is possible.
Moral knowledge is irreducibly first and second person. It lives in the encounter, in the accumulated relational evidence of trust and care, in the kind of knowing that cannot be submitted to a double-blind trial.
Science is also empirical, but it is third-person empiricism by design. It requires the observer to step outside the relational encounter, bracket the particular, and extract what is repeatable and successfully repeat it. That is both its power and its necessary limitation. But there are other, more fundamental, ways of knowing. I know, for instance, that my wife loves me, although I have no means of proving it empirically to you, I know it empirically because it has been tested and confirmed in lived experience over time—through actions, responses, and costly signals that are intelligible just to me. I cannot subject us to any lab experiment that would prove it scientifically, yet I know it to be true.
Relational empiricism is the template for all knowing, because even if it’s proved scientifically we all have to trust that there was not some collusion to make it appear so, as has happened many times before. Science itself presupposes non-scientific forms of knowing (trust, perception, coherence, etc.). But when scientific empiricism becomes the only template for all valid knowing then persons become data, relationships become variables, and moral intuitions become mere feelings—unverifiable noise in the system. And what is not proven scientifically becomes misinformation. The instrument gets confused for the whole of reality.
More on the true epistemological root here: https://www.mesotopia.grouplands.com/latest/science-and-state/the-relational-proof-why-all-knowledge-is-inter-personal
Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave ideology its political form. When the state takes the role of moral formation, individuals are morally measured by conformity to the ideology rather than by conviction and their ethics toward others. It’s no surprise that our schools are the usual mechanism for replacing personal conscience as the source of ethical knowledge. Mao Zedong’s rebellion is one conclusion of Rousseau’s (et al) political philosophy. Intellectuals lead the revolution against instinct and tradition; then the mob, fully ideologically activated, turned on the intellectuals. The revolution always consumes itself because it was grounded in the ideal at the expense of human value.
You cannot shame a man into significance. And if you try, it will be used against you.
Social media is the same general will of the people but with an algorithm. The mob’s verdict feels like conscience because it arrives with emotional intensity, social pressure, and the same dopamine hit—perfectly mimicking the relational empiricism it has replaced. But there is no actual person at its center. Only the ideology and the performance of the professional outrage of the influencer.
There are, of course, good ideals. The abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, and the civil rights movement were driven by moral ideals deeply rooted in particular persons and relationships (often Christian ones). The danger is when ideals become detached from the concrete other and turned into ideologies—totalizing systems of socio-political coercion and control.
The Snake’s Original Pitch
When critics accused God of forbidding the fruit of knowledge, the mathematician and theologian John Lennox responded that this question was first asked by a snake. The entire Enlightenment project positions itself as the courageous eating of the forbidden fruit—reason against superstition, education as liberation. Lennox’s observation punctures it: that framing was not originated by brave intellectuals. It was the serpent’s sales pitch. The oldest ideology-over-moral inversion in the record.
Right now we have almost an entire generation indoctrinated this way. Education—although significantly better than its alternative—is not the answer to this particular moral problem we have on our hands. At least not ideologically poisoned as it is. It is, of course, the answer to many other problems, once the ideological arsenic has been removed. This is the counter-intuitive claim at the heart of this article, and it must be stated plainly. The educated man in Lewis’s novel—trained out of his instincts and into a good little boy of the system—is not a cautionary tale about insufficient education. He is the cautionary tale about education that does not begin with the heart. Miss Hardcastle is not undereducated, she is thoroughly, catastrophically educated, and ethically vacant. She is precisely what Lewis' warns in The Abolition of Man.
The faculty that must be primary is the heart—the seat of relational empirical knowing, the capacity to encounter the actual other person and be changed by that encounter. Education that does not begin there does not humanize. It weaponizes humans against humans.
The Pharisee’s Accounting System
In Luke 18:9-14 Jesus told a story about two men praying. The Pharisee thanks God that he is not like other men—he tithes, he fasts, he keeps the law. The tax collector can only say: be merciful to me, a sinner. The standard reading of this parable is about pride versus humility. But there is a more precise diagnosis: the Pharisee has replaced moral encounter with ideological self-assessment, he’s marking his own test.
He is measuring his performance against the ideology that he inhabits. The tax collector does not exist to him as a human being at all—he is merely the data point that makes the Pharisee’s graph look good. Notice that the Pharisee addresses God while actually talking about himself and his metrics. The tax collector addresses God and can only produce his own moral failure against the objective standard available to all men through all time: “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
One is relational empiricism. The other is ideological performance. Jesus’ verdict vindicates the man whose only virtue is honest relational knowing—over the man with the subjective “superior” ideological record. The Pharisee is placing his ideals above his ethic, and he cannot see it. He feels righteous. His altruism hormones are firing in harmony with his delusion.
The same structure appears in fascism, which sacrifices the person to the collective ideal. In postmodern utilitarianism, which sounds like ethics while systematically evacuating the second-person particular. In every ideology where the victim cannot speak back into the system.
Conclusion
There are many atheist, political and religious ideologies, Christianity is not one of them, or it should not be. When those who call themselves Christian try make it an ideology it—and they—turn into the very beast they are told to abhor, that they claim to abhor.
Christianity stands against ideologies, it does not become one. It is, itself, encapsulated by humility. Christianity points to the person of Christ who broke the iron and clay feet of empires and brought progress, liberty, purpose, wealth, and eternal salvation to billions. Christianity does not point to ideological demands but to humble service and the truth spoken in love.
Ideals feel great until you try to apply them. It’s time we learned how and why to attack ideologies, and not people.
© Alan R. Jones
