When Language Stops Telling the Truth: The Psychology of Ideological Reasoning

On July 15, Cardinal Robert Sarah addressed the European Parliament in Brussels during a session titled 'Europe and Africa: In Conversation with Cardinal Robert Sarah.'[^1] His central claim was precise: 'in the relationship between the European Union and Africa, words are today used not to reveal reality but to hide it, and even to distort it.'[^1] Terms such as 'sexual and reproductive health,' 'gender equality,' and 'human rights' sometimes carry meanings many African societies neither share nor chose, yet arrive packaged as universal obligation. Sarah called this pattern a 'crisis of the logos,' a condition in which reason and language become instruments of power rather than truth: 'If words no longer mean what they say, how can there be authentic dialogue? How can Africa trust a Europe that speaks with equivocal, double-meaning words?'[^1]

Ideology as motivated cognition

Ideology has internal logic, elaborate justification, and genuine emotional investment, so it is not irrational in the sense of being random. What it lacks is the subordination of those investments to reality. Ramón Lucas Lucas, synthesizing Aquinas on the passions, notes that a vehement passion can diminish freedom and, at sufficient intensity, blind reason: the person no longer reasons toward a conclusion so much as from a desire already fixed.[^2] Aquinas locates the mechanism in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 24, a. 3, ad 1 — the passion does more than accompany the judgment; it can corrupt it. Ideology has reasons, in the sense of motivations and emotional drivers, but not reason, in the sense of an intellect genuinely ordered to truth.

What the crisis of the logos looks like from the inside

When language is shaped primarily by fear, status-need, and group solidarity rather than by what things are, the speaker defends against perceived threat. The language this activity generates resists update; disconfirming evidence gets processed not as information but as attack. Steven Hayes, developing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, calls this cognitive fusion: treating one's thoughts and linguistic frames as identical with reality itself rather than as representations of it.[^3] Once fused, a person defends the conceptual frame the way they would defend their body — threat to the frame is threat to the self. This is why diplomatic negotiations conducted in ideologically fused language tend to produce exactly what Cardinal Sarah described: not dialogue but performance, not mutual discernment but the management of dissent.

The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person's account of the Fallen state puts the same dynamic in explicitly anthropological terms: Craig Steven Titus, Paul Vitz, and William Nordling locate the Fallen condition not only in disordered sensory appetite but in a concupiscence that extends into intellectual pride, wanting to be right and validated more than wanting truth.[^4] The intellect rationalizes rather than recognizes, producing sophisticated arguments in service of conclusions already guaranteed by desire.

The West's compensatory universalism

Post-Christian European culture carries anxieties below the level of policy debate: colonial memory produces rhetorical overcorrection, a desire to appear as bearer of universal emancipation rather than particular interest, while the loss of a shared theological anthropology after secularization leaves a felt need for a substitute account of the human good claiming universal scope. That civilizational self-doubt tends to produce the export of anxieties as universals — not from calculated bad faith but from unexamined emotional need. Pope Francis named the same structural shape in Evangelii Gaudium: in a culture where each person wants to be bearer of his or her own subjective truth, it becomes difficult for citizens to devise a common plan transcending individual gain.[^5] The African bishops he cited had said, years earlier, that African countries were being treated as 'parts of a machine, cogs on a gigantic wheel': what Sarah named again before the European Parliament.

Person versus individual in diplomatic speech

Jacques Maritain, in La Personne et le bien commun, drew a distinction that speaks directly to this: the person is constituted by ordered openness to God, to others, to the common good, while the individual seeks self-assertion as the primary mode of existence.[^6] The person's sociability is an ontological trait, not a contingent arrangement; she realizes herself only by giving herself, without losing herself, in reciprocal relation with others. A civilization that forgets this frame replaces dialogue with assertion: the vocabulary of rights, which should express obligations grounded in the other's dignity, becomes a vehicle for projecting the self's unexamined preferences onto others who did not ask for them. John Paul II's reminder in Veritatis Splendor sharpens the point — rejecting equivocal or illicit means in public life derives its urgency from the person's transcendent value, not from procedural preference.[^7]

What follows from the diagnostic

The convergence across these accounts points to a single diagnostic claim: ideological language in its current Western form is a symptom of disordered appetite extended into the intellect, defended by cognitive fusion, reinforced by group identity's social cohesion. Cardinal Sarah names the disorder at the political level; the Catholic Christian account of the person names it at the anthropological level, precisely enough to locate where healing begins — not primarily better arguments, but reordering the appetite so the intellect can attend to what things are. What the tradition calls the pacification of passion by right reason, and what Hayes calls defusion from one's own linguistic constructs, is the condition of authentic dialogue. Until a civilization recovers the desire for truth as a prior commitment, the words it sends across borders remain instruments of power dressed as liberation.

References

[^1]: 'Cardinal Sarah Warns EU Lawmakers of "Crisis of the Logos" in Europe-Africa Relations,' Catholic World Report, July 16, 2026.

[^2]: Lucas Lucas, R. (n.d.). El hombre, espíritu encarnado, citing Tomás de Aquino, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 24, a. 3, ad 1.

[^3]: Blackledge, J. T. (n.d.). An introduction to Relational Frame Theory: Basics and applications. University of Nevada, Reno. (Drawing on Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K., & Wilson, K. G. (1999). Acceptance and commitment therapy. Guilford Press.)

[^4]: Titus, C. S., Vitz, P. C., & Nordling, W. J. (2020). Created in the image of God. In P. C. Vitz, W. Nordling, & C. S. Titus (Eds.), A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration with psychology and mental health practice (pp. 449–472). Divine Mercy University Press.

[^5]: Francis. (2013). Evangelii Gaudium (apostolic exhortation), nos. 61–62. Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

[^6]: Simon, R. (n.d.). Moral, citing Maritain, J. La personne et le bien commun. (Cf. Maritain, J. (1966). The person and the common good. University of Notre Dame Press.)

[^7]: John Paul II. (1993). Veritatis Splendor (encyclical), no. 101. Libreria Editrice Vaticana.