By my current understanding: Individual instinct is instantiated primarily by lower brain systems, which provide motivations of attraction and repulsion toward particular internal and external objects and states. Through middle systems, these basic valences are merged and translated into more complex emotions. In higher systems, these emotions are further shaped into plans, compatible with real-world constraints, to achieve life's goals. Higher layers, in general, act as consultants to lower layers, providing wisdom and guidance over basic desires. The mind is often extended outward, beyond the flesh, to form an extended mind, which includes various exogenous helpers like papers, cameras, and computers.
This overall structure of mind and extension can involve multiple people as well, in a process called distributed cognition. Here, external representations such as language and picture are shared between people to facilitate interpersonal, emergent thought. This thinking often takes an asynchronous form, being processed in pieces over time and space.
With this background, the instantiation of ideology appears to birth a wave of distributed cognition. Like with individual cognition, we should expect to find instinct as the drive of distributed cognition. If one of the core qualities of instinct is being taken at face value as good and worthy, then perhaps the part of ideology closest to instinct is its dogma.
Now, one might argue here that the instinct behind distributed cognition must be the emergent collective of individual instinct; but the phenomenon of groupthink could in theory allow the blind acceptance of emergent cognitive undertakings.
Update 1:
Perhaps the meaning of instinct ought to be clarified. The intent within this context is not instrumental goals or social norms, but the set of intrinsic, innate goals or natures of an agent. Such instinct is presumed immutable, unchanged by learning or experience, although the relative expression between competing instincts can be modulated. Indeed some instincts are social in nature, where their full expression may shine in the light of emergent group behaviour, but their origin is taken as biological, rather than cultural. In terms of nature and nurture, instinct here is meant as nature alone.
Update 2:
The following thought experiment helps to emphasise the primary point of concern.
Event 1: A person or group, driven by instinct, develops an ideology.
Event 2: A group, possibly external to the first, receives this ideology in written form and starts following its advice.
Event 3: Groupthink sets in, with the written text taken as dogma and accepted as part of the group's norms and or identity.
Event 4: Time passes, and culture undergoes semiotic changes.
Event 5: Individuals periodically defer to the dogma, which is no longer taken in its original sense.
Concern: The dogma is being treated as the will of the people, but it clearly differs from the current or even past instincts of the group; yet from the perspective of distributed cognition, the dogma acts as something of an instinct. Hence, an abstract animal of semantic decay, or exogenous nature, has arisen.
With that said: Is ideological dogma an example of exogenous instinct?
