From Ideological Antagonism to Dialectical Synthesis: Possible Forms of a Future Human Cognitive Order—An Integrative Framework of Value Pluralism, Cognitive Depolarization, and Institutional Learning

Ideology is an important form of cognitive organization in modern political and social life. It can organize dispersed values, judgments of interest, historical interpretations, and institutional preferences into relatively stable worldviews, providing individuals with orientation, identity, and frameworks for collective action. Yet when ideology shifts from an interpretive tool into a closed identity, complex reality can be compressed into binary structures such as 'us versus them,' 'right versus wrong,' or 'progressive versus reactionary,' while factual judgment, value judgment, and group loyalty become increasingly entangled. Within the framework of the Human Happiness Community, this paper proposes the Dialectical Synthesis Model of Ideological Cognition (DSMIC). 'Dialectical synthesis' is not understood as taking half from each opposing position, nor does the model assume that all value conflicts can ultimately be dissolved. It is defined instead as a process of decomposing totalized ideologies into three levels - empirical propositions, value claims, and institutional mechanisms - testing empirical claims against evidence, explicitly identifying value conflicts, comparing mechanisms contextually, and using continued practice, feedback, and revision to construct new cognitive and institutional combinations that can absorb multiple legitimate values without remaining bound to a single ideological package. Existing scholarship shows that 'ideology' is itself highly polysemous: it can refer to a worldview, a political doctrine, a group identity, a legitimating discourse, or a structure of bias. Political psychology also shows that political judgment can be influenced by group favoritism, confirmation bias, and motivated reasoning, and that such tendencies are not the exclusive property of any one political camp. Value pluralism, meanwhile, reminds us that liberty, equality, security, community, dignity, efficiency, and other major values cannot necessarily be reduced to a single metric and may enter into genuine conflict. On this basis, the paper develops a seven-stage process of ideological transformation: recognition of the totalized position, value decomposition, fact-value separation, clarification of trade-offs, mechanism comparison, contextual recombination, and open synthesis. A synthesized cognitive structure should not become a new ideology immune from challenge. It must preserve falsifiability, revisability, and the capacity to be decomposed again. The paper concludes that progress in a future human cognitive order need not mean that everyone adopts the same political philosophy. It may instead take the form of a more mature capacity: people can hold clear value commitments without absolutizing an entire ideological package; they can engage in real disagreement while still jointly testing factual claims; and they can acknowledge genuine value conflicts while continuing to search for institutional mechanisms that make a larger number of legitimate values compatible.