The moral depravity of the ideological mind

Saturday's link round-up included a link to this news item which struck me as an example of the worst of human nature.  In cities all around the country, memorial murals have been painted to commemorate the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee who was stabbed to death in North Carolina in August 2025.  Some of these murals have been vandalized.  It seemed a perfect illustration of the inexplicable viciousness and amorality which possesses some people -- defiling a memorial to an indisputably innocent victim of a vicious murder.

Fellow blogger Rade commented on this item, reporting that a mural to Zarutska in his area (Providence RI) aroused opposition because Elon Musk was paying for it and because it was mostly local Republicans who defended painting it.  That is, the objection was less to the mural itself than to who was supporting it.  This sadly all-too-plausible explanation reminded me of an item which I'd included in the "truths and inspirations" post three weeks ago:

The mural vandalizations are a perfect example of this.  The vandals clearly share the ideological mentality.  The ideological mind judges an action or thing (such as a mural) not by the moral character of the action or thing itself, but by whether those who support it are perceived as being on "my team" or "the opposing team".  In this case, "bad" people were in favor of the mural, therefore it was bad.  This kind of mind-set is common among politics-fixated types -- gerrymandering is bad when Republicans do it, but good when Democrats do it, and anti-Semitism is bad when it comes from the right wing but should be ignored or explained away when it comes from the left wing (or the other way around, to a right-wing ideologist), to cite a couple of obvious examples.

Aside from Musk paying for the mural in this case, there are other reasons why the ideological mind would view commemorating Zarutska as "right-wing-coded".  Her murderer had fourteen previous arrests for violent crimes and his own mother had tried to have him involuntarily committed because he was so clearly dangerous, yet he was still running around loose, an egregious example of endangering the public by coddling violent criminals -- a charge commonly leveled against liberals by conservatives.  To the ideological mind, the fact that in this case the charge was obviously justified makes no difference.  All that matters is that it means they perceive the murals as invoking something that they consider right-wing.

(They also clearly care nothing for how news of the vandalism would affect Zarutska's family.  The ideological mind brushes aside such considerations as irrelevant, if it notices them at all.  It is dead to normal human empathy.)

To normal non-ideological people, this mentality is disturbing and incomprehensible.  Actions are good if they are good and bad if they are bad, regardless of which "team" the people doing them are on.  It is people that are judged good or bad based on their actions, not vice-versa.  I no longer have a political "team" that I identify with, but even when I did, I don't believe I ever engaged in that kind of ideological "team" thinking.  Today, I do certainly see that some individuals are morally depraved based on the preponderance of their actions and views, such as Musk and Mamdani and Trump and Newsom -- but if one of those people occasionally does something good, I accept that this is a good thing that has been done regardless of the source.  I don't twist morality into a pretzel trying to make a good thing bad just because it was a bad person who did it.

It is almost as if the ideologists of either "side" are a separate and defective species from mainstream humanity -- weirdly deficient in the kind of basic morality and empathy that makes us human.