This week we talked about ideologies and the sorts of assumptions that it can create in people if it isn’t thoroughly looked at. An ideology is the sort of thinking that we as readers growing up in a particular time, place, and background do in a knee-jerk response to whatever it is we come across. Some things in our life are so habitual that we do them without thinking about them and in some cases come to believe this sort of thinking to be engrained in our very nature or instinctual, though in reality it is less black and white as that.

As a Western, industrialized nation we have certain feelings about how people should interact with one another and what it means to live in a democracy. In developing counties or Islamic countries the underlying experience is very different, ideologies are informed by the lives they live and this creates the many cultural divides that exist between nations. I remember an example from class that struck me particularly was how in certain Middle-Eastern countries that have been given the right to a democratically elected government, voted in parties that ran on the platform of instituting Sharia law. This seem counter-intuitive to our American idea of democracy, but to the devoutly religious countries of the region and their central ideologies, this is a perfect exercise in the democratic process.