Ideologies Essay, Research Paper

Ideologies

An ideology is a set of ideas connected together that explain how government and society should be organized and what set of values the society should embrace. The concept of an ideology is a very slippery topic in that people range in the level or degree of their feelings. Ideologies are simplistic and not concerned about logic and consistency. This means that if they are either conservatives or liberal their ideas may vary slightly. Conservatives may have slight differences in the way they think about society. Their ideas are not clear cut or precise.

Ideologies contain a view of human nature. In other words, they tell what people are like. There are not clear-cut answers to who is right with their ideas. They are people’s opinions. There are no right answers, but some seem to work better than others do.

Nazism is an ideology where a dictator rules all and runs the country himself. The people who join the party believe that there needs to be a single person in charge of the government in order for the country to be run correctly. A communist thinks everybody should be the same. Everybody gets paid the same for doing different degrees of work. No matter how disgusted people may feel about their views, they are ideologies and they are practiced none the less.

Liberals are very progressive and optimistic about people. They think that people are good when given a chance. They believe in lighter prison sentences for convicted criminals and blame crime on environmental factors like poverty. A big emphasis is on better education and job training for people who are being rehabilitated. Liberals think that all people can become “better” with rehabilitation and think prisons should emphasize on rehab. I believe that liberals would rather have freedom over order.

Conservatives on the other hand have a more pessimistic outlook on people. They believe that there will always be crime and poverty so why not increase jail time. Conservatives would also like to see harsher penalties given to convicted felons. Forget about the rehabilitation and start paying for the crime that was done. Build more prisons and send more people to them. Conservatives would rather have order over rights. Public order is more important to uphold so that there are fewer crimes. With this you lose a little more freedom as well.

In order to find out what our personal ideology was we took a small quiz with questions about different ideas. Once all of the questions were completed you had to add up the number of total points. That would give you a rough idea of what you believed in.

Many of the questions had to do with human nature or at least aspects of human nature. Myself looking at the world sort of pessimistically was considered to be more conservative than liberal. The only problem with my results was that some of the questions did not pertain to me. Also I did not understand a few of them. Some of the questions I answered could have gone either way so there is a thin line in between being a liberal and conservative.