Adrian Piper is a conceptual artist who was educated at Harvard and is credited with the ‘race card,’ but I digress. In her article entitled Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-Awareness, she outlines a persons belief system and what sorts of interactions have the power to change that person’s ideology. Piper also notes how ideology is pernicious (wicked) in that it makes people behave idiotically, and selfishly, but also the mechanisms that ideology uses to protect itself.

Piper outlines three of these protective mechanisms as follows:

The false identity mechanism is the use of what a person believes as objective fact to support their own self-esteem and having the confidence to label themselves as normal. In other words thinking of homosexuals as strange or unequal, blacks as ignorant and/or unequal, and sadists as perverts. Stereotypes play a large role in the false identity mechanism along with inequality. Inequality has plagued society for millions of years, and likely always will, but it is truly a social construct and identity mechanism that people use to feel better about themselves.

The illusion of perfectibility mechanism grants justification to personal opinion.  The opinions of others do not matter simply because you have created enough support in your head to change your views regardless of counter-evidence. This mechanism creates arrogance in people which in short leads to isolation because people do not like being in the company of those who are intolerant of other’s opinions or beliefs.

The one-way communication mechanism resembles the prior mechanism in many ways.  One-way communication creates a personality not welcoming to critics (because any question of your attitude or ideas is taken as a personal attack) and counting those critics as immoral or psychotic. Morality is subjective and everyone has different morals, without this the world would be a boring place. However, if someone is unwavering in their morals, they use one-way communication to rebel or outcast anyone who thinks differently.

In essence, society is inherently wicked. There is a constant urge by most people to stand up for their views and shoot down the views of others. Communication plays a huge role in not only influencing a person’s ideology, but also deconstructing that ideology. Intolerance of race and sexuality are constructs instilled by parents and early influences that are hard to modify. These ideas become even harder to influence or deconstruct if a person is arrogant or unable to communicate well with others.