Potemkin wrote:I don't see how that is possible, @foxdemon. After all, even the fact that government exists at all is itself ideological - the anarchists and lolbertarians would like to abolish government altogether, for ideological reasons, while sane people want to keep at least a minimal government apparatus, for similarly ideological reasons. Everything about governments is ideological, and they are never more ideological than when they claim not to be ideological.
I acknowledge there is a problem with my suggestion. I am struggling to see how ideology could be separated from the state as religion was.
Let’s take a step back and ask ourselves what politics is all about. I like this definition: “politics is about who gets what, when and how”. Some American dude said that. This should not be taken to completely invalidate the quote in your dog, as politics often manifests that way. However, I think it is reasonable to say politics is about the distribution of resources.
Ideology, as applied to politics, is a system of belief about who gets what, when and how. Take liberalism for example. Here we have a system of belief tailored to justify mercantile townsfolk being the predominant interest group that the state and society ought aim answers to the question of who get what, when and how. This is done by emphasising such norms as private property ownership, including the means of production, various concepts of meritocracy, etc.
OK, so there’s your basic capitalist system. But what happens when this system of belief runs it’s course and a distribution of resources results which excludes are large proportion of the population? Of course an alternative ideology will emerge which argues for a different justification of resources. Such as the late 19th century labour and social justice movement which ultimately led to public schools, welfare, universal sufferage, laws regarding working conditions, etc. The reduction of social-economic inequality over the 20th century up til the Regan/Thatcher era was the result.
This is where the problems start, since those benefiting from liberalism where of a mindset to accept a winner takes all mentality in the first place, they are not likely to simply give in to the new ideology that would not benifit them. So now we have ideological conflict for control of the state to see who can exclude the opposition. And what better way to do that than by using the instruments of the state to persecute the opposition?
However, to achieve this, one must be able to present a moral justification to make such discrimination lawful. If one could take the opposition’s morality and turn it against thenm, then one would be in a very good position to justify their exclusion from the political process and implement laws to keep them marginalised in terms they couldn’t argue against. Well not without abandoning those social justice beliefs. So if liberals could co-opt social justice....wait, that is what PC is!
Since liberal thinkers such as Rawls, liberalism has recast itself as being about rights between identity groups rather than rights between individuals and the state. This is the means by which liberalism has appropriated social justice. Now the higher levels of the bourgeoisie can decide which identity groups should be favoured over others.
Of course it is the majority labour group than is going to be targeted for marginalisation. How better to concentrate power and thus wealth in one’s own hands than to exclude the majority? And what’s more social justice provides all the moral legitimacy needed for drafting all sorts of laws to achieve that aim.
It is, in my opinion, no accident that rising levels of socio-economic inequality and rising levels of PC are coincidental. This appropriation of social justice by liberalism is the new ‘how’ of who get what and when. And so we see an endless stream of propaganda on the evils of white males and how their privileges must be removed. And yet minorities still mysteriously never seem to see their position improve. Yet the wealth and power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few.
A sensible, though ghtful person will look at this and call it an absurdly illogical situation (ie: bullshit).
So there is a need for the elites to repress such thoughtful people. And what we get is a cult like implementation of liberal social justice which is based on faith rather than reason. This is not actually any different from mid 19th century liberalism which used religion for the same purposes. How did Marx put it again?
“The heart of a heartless world, the soul of a soulless condition, the sigh of the oppressed beast...
religion social justice is the opium of the masses”.
But there is a counter reformation reaction. Just as irrational. Trump and his supporters represent that reaction. They have rejected social justice but still represent labour. Now they have temporarily taken the state and used its power hamfistedly to correct wrongs. The liberal PC mob will take the state’s power back and persecute the counter reformists twice as zealously. Then the cycle will repeat, each time with greater ruthlessness.
How to prevent this? I suggested separating ideology from the state as a solution on the grounds that it is the same process as the wars of the reformation and thus the same solution could be applied.
Perhaps a more practical solution would be to identify liberal social justice capitalism as a ruthless and uncompromising system of belief that will happily destroy intellectual freedoms in order to protect the concentration of power. Quite the opposite of what liberals claim to be about.
And the result is an intolerant and unstable society that is increasingly at war with itself.
So @Potemkin , what should we do about all of this?
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