An ideology is not best understood as a collection of ideas residing in individual minds. Fascism, communism, capitalism, liberalism and the rest are names given to relatively persistent configurations of communication: recurrent relations among symbols, institutions, behaviours, expectations, identities and responses. Individuals enter these configurations, reproduce them and modify them, but do not contain them. Participants can disappear while much of the pattern persists. What survives is not an identical state, but a continuity of relation across changing states. In this sense, an ideology is a persistent but continually reorganised pattern of relations across interacting systems, sufficiently coherent to remain recognisable through change. This general view is consistent with work on social representations in which meaning is produced, circulated and received through cognition, behaviour and communication (Moscovici, 1988; Bauer and Gaskell, 1999).
This pattern does not determine what happens next. Its influence is probabilistic: it changes what is likely to happen next. History, institutions, language, technologies, habits and previous interactions form a shifting filter through which some interpretations and responses become more likely to arise, recur and persist than others. But the filter is also generative. By making some transitions more probable, it helps produce the conditions encountered by whatever follows. Repeated cultural transformations can be biased towards some regions of possibility without requiring faithful copying or central control (Buskell, 2017), while interacting populations can generate stable cultural attractors by providing one another with the conditions for subsequent learning (Falandays and Smaldino, 2022). Each response enters that changing field and alters it in turn. Repetition establishes expectation; expectation biases interpretation; interpretation changes what can readily follow. Ideology can therefore percolate through a population without ever being transmitted as a complete doctrine. It travels unevenly through classifications, metaphors, procedures, incentives, exclusions, identities and ordinary expectations. Each instance may be partial, weak or ambiguous. Together, they can generate a pattern more coherent and persistent than any of its individual expressions.
Ideology does not merely simplify philosophy; it can help construct the conditions under which simplification becomes necessary. Most people do not have unlimited time, energy, skill or inclination for sustained reflection. Under those conditions, ready-made interpretive structures have an obvious advantage. They compress complexity. They supply categories, explanations, values and expectations in forms that can be quickly reused. The recursion matters because some ideological and economic systems reproduce those constraints in turn. Research on scarcity shows that constrained resources can redirect attention and impose cognitive costs, while research on working time finds that long and unsociable hours can reduce opportunities for political participation (Shah et al., 2018; Li et al., 2023). A social order organised around long working hours, insecurity, debt, competition, administrative burden and constant informational interruption can therefore reduce the time and attention available for examining the assumptions on which that order rests. The system does not need to prohibit reflection. It can make reflection expensive.
This is why such configurations can remain recognisable while continually changing. Capitalism, communism and fascism have all taken different forms across different times and circumstances. Persistence does not require the repetition of a state. It requires enough of the relations between states to be reproduced. The same basic logic appears in complex processes more generally: patterns can be continually regenerated through interaction even as their particular components change. Temporarily coherent social patterns can likewise be described as informationally coupled, self-organising dynamical systems, including metastable configurations that persist without becoming permanently fixed (Tognoli et al., 2020). Communication is crucial because those relations unfold in time. Repetition, timing, delay, amplification and attenuation continually alter what is heard, what disappears, what coincides with what and what becomes expected next. Small modulations accumulate. Some differences are reinforced; others dissipate. Some responses begin to recur together. Over time, a characteristic pattern can persist through precisely the changes that appear to transform it. In political systems, path-dependence research similarly shows how timing, sequence and initially contingent events can alter the accessibility and persistence of later trajectories (Pierson, 2000).
None of this makes fascism, communism or capitalism equivalent in history, consequence or moral significance. It places them within the same general class of phenomenon: recognisable constellations within a much larger field of communicative possibility. We inhabit these configurations, but they also inhabit us. They are already present in the distinctions, expectations and available responses through which experience becomes intelligible, even as our participation reproduces and changes them. What appears from within as conviction, doctrine or political identity appears at another scale as recurrent pattern distributed across people, institutions, technologies and time. This is why defeating an argument does not necessarily destroy what generated it. A slogan can disappear. A leader can fall. A doctrine can be discredited. Yet the relations that made them probable can remain. Given the right conditions, they can organise another expression and begin again.
References
Bauer, M.W. and Gaskell, G. (1999) ‘Towards a paradigm for research on social representations’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 29(2), pp. 163–186. doi: 10.1111/1468-5914.00096.
Buskell, A. (2017) ‘What are cultural attractors?’, Biology & Philosophy, 32(3), pp. 377–394. doi: 10.1007/s10539-017-9570-6.
Falandays, J.B. and Smaldino, P.E. (2022) ‘The emergence of cultural attractors: How dynamic populations of learners achieve collective cognitive alignment’, Cognitive Science, 46(8), e13183. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13183.
Li, J., Giebler, H., Wetter, R., Kenyon Lair, H. and Ellingwood, J. (2023) ‘Unequal electoral participation: the negative effects of long work hours and unsociable work schedules in Europe’, European Journal of Politics and Gender, 6(1), pp. 92–113. doi: 10.1332/251510821X16602019188175.
Moscovici, S. (1988) ‘Notes towards a description of social representations’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 18(3), pp. 211–250. doi: 10.1002/ejsp.2420180303.
Pierson, P. (2000) ‘Increasing returns, path dependence, and the study of politics’, American Political Science Review, 94(2), pp. 251–267. doi: 10.2307/2586011.
Shah, A.K., Zhao, J., Mullainathan, S. and Shafir, E. (2018) ‘Money in the mental lives of the poor’, Social Cognition, 36(1), pp. 4–19. doi: 10.1521/soco.2018.36.1.4.
Tognoli, E., Zhang, M., Fuchs, A., Beetle, C. and Kelso, J.A.S. (2020) ‘Coordination dynamics: A foundation for understanding social behavior’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 14, 317. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2020.00317.
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