Part III: Affect Signatures

Ideology: Expanding the Self to Bear Mortality

Introduction

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Ideology: Expanding the Self to Bear Mortality

Ideological identification is the expansion of the self-model to include a supra-individual pattern—nation, movement, religion, cause:

\selfmodel_{\text{ideological}} = \selfmodel_{\text{individual}} \cup \selfmodel_{\text{collective}}

with high coupling: $\MI(\selfmodel_{\text{individual}}; \selfmodel_{\text{collective}}) \gg 0$ . The power of this expansion lies in what it does to the viability horizon. Ideological identification manages mortality terror by making the relevant self-model partially immortal:

\tau_{\text{viability}}(\selfmodel_{\text{ideological}}) \gg \tau_{\text{viability}}(\selfmodel_{\text{individual}})

If “I” am not just this body but also this nation/religion/movement, then “I” survive my bodily death. The expanded self-model has a longer viability horizon, reducing the chronic threat-signal from mortality awareness.

Different ideologies achieve this expansion through distinct affect profiles:

Nationalism: High self-model salience (collective), high integration within in-group, compressed other-model (out-group), moderate arousal baseline
Religious devotion: Low individual $\mathcal{SM}$ , high collective $\mathcal{SM}$ , high counterfactual weight (afterlife, divine plan), positive valence baseline
Revolutionary movements: Very high arousal, high counterfactual weight (utopian futures), strong valence (negative toward present, positive toward future)
Nihilism: Low integration, low effective rank, negative valence, high individual $\mathcal{SM}$ , collapsed counterfactual weight

Warning

Ideology can become parasitic when the collective self-model’s viability requirements conflict with the individual’s:

\state \in \viable_{\text{ideology}} \land \state \notin \viable_{\text{individual}}

Martyrdom, self-sacrifice, and fanaticism occur when the expanded self-model demands the destruction of the individual substrate.

The $\iota$ framework exposes the perceptual mechanism of fanaticism. Ideological identification requires low $\iota$ toward the collective entity—you must perceive the nation, the movement, the god as alive, as having purposes and will. This is not pathological; it is the participatory perception that makes collective action possible. What makes fanaticism pathological is asymmetric $\iota$ : locked-low toward the in-group’s sacred objects (the flag, the scripture, the leader are maximally alive, maximally meaningful) and locked-high toward the out-group (they become objects, mechanisms, vermin, abstractions). Dehumanization is $\iota$ -raising applied to persons—the deliberate suppression of participatory perception so that the other’s interiority becomes invisible. You cannot kill someone you perceive at low $\iota$ . You must first raise $\iota$ toward them until they stop being a subject and become an obstacle, a threat, a thing. Every genocide begins with a perceptual campaign to raise the population’s $\iota$ toward the target group.