When the human mind becomes
too affixed to a political ideology, rather it is “right,” “center,” or “left,”
one way that the excessive attachment can be seen by other people is by perspectival
distortion. A very basic illustration of this cognitive-perceptional lapse is
when someone claims that only X but not Y is problematic even though both X and
Y can be criticized using the same or even related criteria. Besides the fact
that ideology is inherently partial rather than wholistic, “sins of omission” concerning
X or Y (but not both) due to a cognitive-perspectival distortion, which in turn
comes from the partiality of any ideology, can easily be viewed as unethical in
virtue of being patently unfair as well as self-serving, ideologically. This
very abstract paragraph sprang from news reports of U.S. Senator Linsey Graham
referring to Iran’s Khamenei as a Hitler-figure while giving Israel’s Netanyahu
a pass even though by January 11, 2026 when Graham spoke, the large-scale
killing and suffering of a people had easily dwarfed the few thousand Iranian
protesters who had been killed on the street. Even mentioning an equivalence
would have been sufficient in terms of which leader comes closer to being a 21st
century Hitler. As a result, the U.S. senator’s credibility undoubtedly took a
hit—except, interestingly, to people sharing the senator’s foreign-policy
ideology. This too flags political ideology itself as problematic for the human
mind.
The full essay is at "Distortions of Political Perspective."
