Imagine you are a single cell organism capable of independent life faced with a short-sighted and short lived existence. It’s a cold night and you bump into another similar organism just trying to stay warm and you both discover that where your cell walls touch is warmer.  So you stay touching through the night.  More cells join in each night to conserve energy and to stay warm and it becomes the best way to survive. So everybody does it.  The external environment and thermodynamics establishes an ethical strategy everybody shares to enhance life.

An ethos is internally reconciled between body and heart arising from community dynamics with the mind as observer/recorder. An ideology is a mental construct tending to concentrate power within mind generally detrimental to the body and heart.

In ancient Athens at the foundations of democracy, politics was considered to be ruled by ethics because the body politic was known to be a living macrocosm of the community’s shared ethics.  As above, so below. Today, ethics has been replaced by ideology and along with it has destroyed the restraints upon democracy’s greatest weaknesses, mob rule and the loss of individual rights.