Short Ideological Quotes

In The Gulag Archipelago, for example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarks that Shakespeare’s evildoers, Macbeth notably among them, stop short at a mere dozen corpses because they have no ideology.

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a 'resource.' This is crucial, because unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet.

Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.... Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy . . . whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games. Idolaters by instinct, we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional. History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

On the 'Celestial Seasonings' green tea packet there is a short explanation of its benefits: 'Green tea is a natural source of antioxidants, which neutralize harmful molecules in the body known as free radicals. By taming free radicals, antioxidants help the body maintain its natural health.' Mutatis mutandis, is not the notion of totalitarianism one of the main ideological antioxidants, whose function throughout its career was to tame free radicals, and thus to help the social body to maintain its politico-ideological good health?

At this point I reveal myself in my true colours, as a stick-in-the-mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves. I also hold one or two beliefs that are more difficult to put shortly. For example, I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole. All living things are our brothers and sisters. Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.

White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it’s more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence.

no ideology can protect a son from the unwelcome inheritance of his father’s ambitions.

Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity's relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we've learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: life is- more than anything else- a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time and various living things. It's not just about human-to-human interaction; it's not just about spiritual interaction. It's about all interaction. We're bound with the rest of life in a network, a network including not just all living things but the energy and nonliving matter that flows through the living, making and keeping all of us alive as we make it alive. We can keep debating ideologies and sending entreaties toward heaven. But unless we embrace the fuller reality we're in- and reality's implications- we'll face big problems.

The right of the labour movement, to be honest, has no ideas of any compelling quality, except the instinct for short-term political survival. It would not know an ideological struggle if it stumbled across one in the dark. The only ‘struggle’ it engages in with any trace of conviction is the one against the left.

Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology -- a secular religion which, like the religions that progress has challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its credentials. Progress, therefore, has become 'myth' in the anthropological sense. By this I do not mean a belief that is flimsy or untrue. Successful myths are powerful and often partly true. […] The myth of progress has sometimes served us well -- those of us seated at the best tables, anyway -- and may continue to do so. […] Progress has an internal logic that can lead beyond reason to catastrophe. (4-5)

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world.

Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words—in short, what we call transcendence. Without that you don’t have a mythology. Any system of thinking, ideologies of one kind or another, that does not open to transcendence cannot be classified or understood mythologically.

One problem for the analyst of ideologies is that many holders of ideology, especially but not solely conservatives, have denied that they are ideological. Instead they have seen themselves as pragmatic, reserving the appellation 'ideology' only for the ideas of those political movements that issue plans for radical and total change. This undoubtedly reflects the problem that open contestation, and consequently the need for justification, have been largely absent in the totalitarian regimes.

Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.

Can a nation surrender its freedom and a civil society to a rabid ideology in just two short years?

We live in a culture of reductionism. Or better, we are living in the aftermath of a culture of reductionism, and I believe we have reduced the complexity and diversity of the Scriptures to systematic theologies that insist on ideological conformity, even when such conformity flattens the diversity of the Scriptural witness. We have reduced our conception of gospel to four simple steps that short-circuit biblical narratives and notions of the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven in favor of a simplified means of entrance to heaven. Our preaching is often wed to our materialistic, consumerist cultural assumptions, and sermons are subsequently reduced to delivering messages that reinforce the worst of what American culture produces: self-centered end users who believe that God is a resource that helps an individual secure what amounts to an anemic and culturally bound understanding of the 'abundant life.

Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Under Communism, both religion and pseudoscience were systematically suppressed—except for the superstition of the state ideological religion. It was advertised as scientific, but fell as far short of this ideal as the most unselfcritical mystery cult.

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.

Foucault’s was a seductive image, one that helped to make him famous and to attract legions of disciples. But for all that, it remains a late 20th-century ideological construct, one with little or no contemporary relevance or resonance in the societies it purports to describe.

What one should add here is that self-consciousness is itself unconscious: we are not aware of the point of our self-consciousness. If ever there was a critic of the fetishizing effect of fascinating and dazzling "leitmotifs", it is Adorno: in his devastating analysis of Wagner, he tries to demonstrate how Wagnerian leitmotifs serve as fetishized elements of easy recognition and thus constitute a kind of inner-structural commodification of his music. It is then a supreme irony that traces of this same fetishizing procedure can be found in Adorno's own writings. Many of his provocative one-liners do effectively capture a profound insight or at least touch on a crucial point (for example: "Nothing is more true in pscyhoanalysis than its exaggeration"); however, more often than his partisans are ready to admit, Adorno gets caught up in his own game, infatuated with his own ability to produce dazzlingly "effective" paradoxical aphorisms at the expense of theoretical substance (recall the famous line from Dialectic of Englightment on how Hollywood's ideological maniuplation of social reality realized Kant's idea of the transcendental constitution of reality). In such cases where the dazzling "effect" of the unexpected short-circuit (here between Hollywood cinema and Kantian ontology) effectively overshadows the theoretical line of argumentation, the brilliant paradox works precisely in the same manner as the Wagnerian leitmotif: instead of serving as a nodal point in the complex network of structural mediation, it generates idiotic pleasure by focusing attention on itself. This unintended self-reflexivity is something of which Adorno undoubtedly was not aware: his critique of the Wagnerian leitmotif was an allegorical critique of his own writing. Is this not an exemplary case of his unconscious reflexivity of thinking? When criticizing his opponent Wagner, Adorno effectively deploys a critical allegory of his own writing - in Hegelese, the truth of his relation to the Other is a self-relation.

For illustrations and analysis of the ways in which Justices have shifted over time from their original ideological positions, see the article by Lee Epstein and her co-authors, “Ideological Drift Among Supreme Court Justices: Who, When, and How Important?” Northwestern Law Review Colloquy 101 (2007): 127–31.

In all conflicts between groups, there are three elements. One: the certitude that our group is morally superior, possibly even chosen by God. All others should follow our example or be at our service. In order to bring peace to the world, we have to impose our set of beliefs upon others, through manipulation, force, and fear, if necessary. Two: a refusal or incapacity to see or admit to any possible errors or faults in our group. The undeniable nature of our own goodness makes us think we are infallible; there can be no wrong in us. Three: a refusal to believe that any other group possesses truth or can contribute anything of value. At best, others may be regarded as ignorant, unenlightened, and possessing only half—truths; at worst, they are seen as destructive, dangerous, and possessed by evil spirits: they need to be overpowered for the good of humanity. Society and cultures are, then, divided into the “good” and the “bad”; the good attributing to themselves the mission to save, to heal, to bring peace to a wicked world, according to their own terms and under their controlling power. Such is the story of all civilizations through the ages as they spread over the earth by invading and colonizing. Differences must be suppressed; “savages” must be civilized. We must prove by all possible means that our culture, our power, our knowledge, and our technology are the best, that our gods are the only gods! This is not just the story of civilizations but also of all wars of religion, inquisitions, censorships, dictatorships; all things, in short, that are ideologies. An ideology is a set of ideas translated into a set of values. Because they are held to be absolutely true, these ideas and values need to be imposed on others if they are not readily accepted. A political system, a school of psychology, and a philosophy of economics can all be ideologies. Even a place of work can be an ideology. Religious sub—groups, sects, are based upon ideological principles. Religions themselves can become ideologies. And ideologues, by their nature, are not open to new ideas or even to debate; they refuse to accept or listen to anyone else’s reality. They refuse to admit any possibility of error or even criticism of their system; they are closed up in their set of ideas, theories, and values. We human beings have a great facility for living illusions, for protecting our self—image with power, for justifying it all by thinking we are the favoured ones of God.

Even more essential, however, is the identification of the individuals in the masses with the "führer." The more helpless the "mass-individual" has become, owing to his upbringing, the more pronounced is his identification with the führer, and the more the childish need for protection is disguised in the form of a feeling at one with the führer. This inclination to identify is the psychological basis of national narcissism, i.e., of the self-confidence that individual man derives from the "greatness of the nation." The reactionary lower middle-class man perceives himself in the führer, in the authoritarian state. On the basis of this identification he feels himself to be a defender of the "national heritage," of the "nation," which does not prevent him, likewise on the basis of this identification, from simultaneously despising "the masses" and confronting them as an individual. The wretchedness of his material and sexual situation is so overshadowed by the exalting idea of belonging to a master race and having a brilliant führer that, as time goes on, he ceases to realize how completely he has sunk to a position of insignificant, blind allegiance. The worker who is conscious of his skills—he, in short, who has rid himself of his submissive structure, who identifies with his work and not with the führer, with the international working masses and not with the national homeland—represents the opposite of this. He feels himself to be a leader, not on the basis of his identification with the führer, but on the basis of his consciousness of performing work that is vitally necessary for society's existence.

The Blessed Mother, bearer of the Logos Incarnate, had brought the logos to the warring, disillusioned, and defeated tribes of Mexico and had created out of this warring diversity one nation with a Messianic mission. Mexico was the "cosmic race." Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared as a mestiza, the mixture of European and Native American races. She was the cosmic symbol of the race mixing which the English had feared since the moment they had set foot on the soil of the New World. She was the symbol of Mexican identity. She was the symbol of Catholic race-mixing and the antithesis of England's (and later) America's and (still later) Germany's short-lived ideology of racial superiority.

Because this report considered “commitment to multicultural social studies education” to be crucial, it called for “extensive staff development” which would “address attitudes”—i.e., indoctrination—and which would extend even to the schools’ clerical staffs and bus drivers.7 In short, the call for cultural “diversity” is a call for ideological conformity.

Man is strange: despite his feats of scientific and societal progress, his search for the best the earth has to offer, his construction of skyscrapers, his control over the diseases that used to wipe us out, and his escape from the short life that used to define his existence on earth, here he is, still prisoner to ideologies able to move him from heaven to hell in the blink of an eye.

It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual. Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations. To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly. The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

There is a curious phenomenon in Western intellectual life, namely that of being right at the wrong time. To be right at the wrong time is far, far worse than having been wrong for decades on end. In the estimation of many intellectuals, to be right at the wrong time is the worst possible social faux pas; like telling an off-colour joke at the throning of a bishop. In short, it is in unforgivable bad taste. There was never a good time, for example, to be anti-communist. Those who early warned of the dangers of bolshevism were regarded as lacking in compassion for the suffering of the masses under tsarism, as well as lacking the necessary imagination to “build” a better world. Then came the phase of denial of the crimes of communism, when to base one’s anti-communism on such phenomena as organised famine and the murder of millions was regarded as the malicious acceptance of ideologically-inspired lies and calumnies. When finally the catastrophic failure of communism could no longer be disguised, and all the supposed lies were acknowledged to have been true, to be anti-communist became tasteless in a different way: it was harping on pointlessly about what everyone had always known to be the case. The only good anti-communist was a mute anti-communist.

Yet how can we make sense of an ideology that appeals to skinheads and intellectuals; denounces the bourgeoisie while forming alliances with conservatives; adopts a macho style yet attracts many women; calls for a return to tradition and is fascinated by technology; idealizes the people and is contemptuous of mass society; and preaches violence in the name of order? Fascism, as Ortega y Gasset says, is always ‘A and not A’.

To articulate more precisely the way in which the Lacanian phallic signifier entails the impossibility of metalanguage, let us return to the poststructuralist understanding of the idea that 'there is no metalanguage'. Its starting point is the fact that the zero level of all metalanguages - natural, ordinary language - is simultaneously the last interpretative framework of all of them: it is the ultimate metalanguage. Ordinary language is its own metalanguage. It is self-referential; the place of an incessant auto-reflexive movement. In this conceptualization one does not mention the object too much. Usually, one gets rid of it simply by pointing out how 'reality' is already structured through the medium of language. In this way post-structuralists can calmly abandon themselves to the infinite self-interpretative play of language. 'There is no metalanguange' is actually taken to mean its exact opposite: that there is no pure object-language, any language that would function as a purely transparent medium for the designation of pre-given reality. Every 'objective' statement about things includes some kind of self-distance, a rebounding of the signifier from its 'literal meaning'. In short, language is always saying, more or less, something other than what it means to say.

The enemy is noise. By noise I mean not simply the noise of technology, the noise of money or advertising and promotion, the noise of the media, the noise of miseducation, but the terrible excitement and distraction generated by the crises of modern life. Mind, I don't say that philistinism is gone. It is not. It has found many disguises, some highly artistic and peculiarly insidious. But the noise of life is the great threat. Contributing to it are real and unreal issues, ideologies, rationalizations, errors, delusions, nonsituations that look real, nonquestions demanding consideration, opinions, analyses in the press, on the air, expertise, inside dope, factional disagreement, official rhetoric, information—in short, the sounds of the public sphere, the din of politics, the turbulence and agitation that set in about 1914 and have now reached an intolerable volume.

However, I have also argued for allegory’s positive effects. It is a process that typically takes control away from the author of a narrative and gives it to the reader. It is the reader who decides whether to interpret writing on a literal or a symbolic level. In giving greater control to the reader, allegory allows for imaginative and reflective analyses of mythology, and for its ideological purposes to be criticized, as well as affirmed.

The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.

The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion. One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverse is, one has an ideological production). The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning. In saying this, I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author…

They had been able to criticise the Beijing government publicly without fear of retribution. In 1929, a number of prominent liberals spoke out in a collection of essays called On Human Rights. Hu Shih, the leading liberal of the day, wrote that his fellow countrymen had already been through a ‘liberation of the mind’, but now ‘the collaboration of the Communists and the Nationalists has created a situation of absolute dictatorship and our freedoms of thought and speech are being lost. Today we may disparage God, but may not criticise Sun Yat-sen. We don’t have to go to Sunday church services, but we have to attend the weekly [Sun] Commemorative Service and read the Sun Yat-sen Testament.’ ‘The freedom we want to establish is the freedom to criticise the Nationalist party and to criticise Sun Yat-sen. Even the Almighty can be criticised, why can’t the Nationalists and Sun Yat-sen?’ And, ‘The Nationalist government is deeply unpopular, partly because its political system fell far short of people’s expectations, and partly because its corpse-like ideology failed to

White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be—and still is—teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support. White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it’s more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence.

Muhammad had become the head of a collection of tribal groups that were not bound together by blood but by a shared ideology, an astonishing innovation in Arabian society. Nobody was forced to convert to the religion of the Quran, but Muslims, pagans and Jews all belonged to one ummah, could not attack one another, and vowed to give each other protection. News of this extraordinary new ‘supertribe’ spread, and though at the outset nobody thought that it had a chance of survival, it proved to be an inspiration that would bring peace to Arabia before the death of the Prophet in 632, just ten years after the hijrah.

The violent secularism of al-Nasser had led Qutb to espouse a form of Islam that distorted both the message of the Quran and the Prophet’s life. Qutb told Muslims to model themselves on Muhammad: to separate themselves from mainstream society (as Muhammad had made the hijrah from Mecca to Medina), and then engage in a violent jihad. But Muhammad had in fact finally achieved victory by an ingenious policy of non-violence; the Quran adamantly opposed force and coercion in religious matters, and its vision—far from preaching exclusion and separation—was tolerant and inclusive. Qutb insisted that the Quranic injunction to toleration could occur only after the political victory of Islam and the establishment of a true Muslim state. The new intransigence sprang from the profound fear that is at the core of fundamentalist religion. Qutb did not survive. At al-Nasser’s personal insistence, he was executed in 1966. Every Sunni fundamentalist movement has been influenced by Qutb. Most spectacularly it has inspired Muslims to assassinate such leaders as Anwar al-Sadat, denounced as a jahili ruler because of his oppressive policies towards his own people. The Taliban, who came to power in Afghanistan in 1994, are also affected by his ideology.

It is possible to understand Nietzsche's fulminations against modern politics in the same light as those against morality: given the nihilistic nature of modern valuation systems, all attempts at asserting values, whether in morality or politics, must, of necessity, encourage the onslaught of nihilism. A short reflection of the consequences of the modern mixture of morality and politics and the ensuing ideological conflicts should give one pause before condemning Nietzsche's attack on morality. He is saying that the fact which makes modern politics so dangerous is precisely that morality and politics are of necessity tied.

This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily pronounceable. In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for political purposes, were short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words—goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joy camp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others—were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgment should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain willful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further. So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised.

There is another typical feature of ideological pursuit: the victims supported by ideologues are always innocent (and it is sometimes true that victims are innocent), and the perpetrators are always evil (evil perpetrators are also not in short supply). But the fact that there exist genuine victims and perpetrators provides no excuse to make low-resolution, blanket statements about the global locale of blameless victimization and evil perpetration—particularly of the type that does not take the presumed innocence of the accused firmly into account. No group guilt should be assumed—and certainly not of the multigenerational kind.

So far from a political ideology being the quasi-divine parent of political activity, it turns out to be its earthly stepchild. Instead of an independently premeditated scheme of ends to be pursued, it is a system of ideas abstracted from the manner in which people have been accustomed to go about the business of attending to the arrangements of their societies. The pedigree of every political ideology shows it to be the creature, not of premeditation in advance of political activity, but of meditation upon a manner of politics. In short, political activity comes first and a political ideology follows after; and the understanding of politics we are investigating has the disadvantage of being, in the strict sense, preposterous. Let us consider the matter first in relation to scientific hypothesis, which I have taken to play a role in scientific activity in some respects similar to that of an ideology in politics. If a scientific hypothesis were a self-generated bright idea which owed nothing to scientific activity, then empiricism governed by hypothesis could be considered to compose a self-contained manner of activity; but this certainly is not its character. The truth is that only a man who is already a scientist can formulate a scientific hypothesis; that is, an hypothesis is not an independent invention capable of guiding scientific inquiry, but a dependent supposition which arises as an abstraction from within already existing scientific activity. Moreover, even when the specific hypothesis has in this manner been formulated, it is inoperative as a guide to research without constant reference to the traditions of scientific inquiry from which it was abstracted. The concrete situation does not appear until the specific hypothesis, which is the occasion of empiricism being set to work, is recognized as itself the creature of owing how to conduct a scientific inquiry. Or consider the example of cookery. It might be supposed that an ignorant man, some edible materials, and a cookery book compose together the necessities of a self-moved (or concrete) activity called cooking. But nothing is further from the truth. The cookery book is not an independently generated beginning from which cooking can spring; it is nothing more than an abstract of somebody's knowledge of how to cook: it is the stepchild, not the parent of the activity. The book, in its tum, may help to set a man on to dressing a dinner, but if it were his sole guide he could never, in fact, begin: the book speaks only to those who know already the kind of thing to expect from it and consequently bow to interpret it. Now, just as a cookery book presupposes somebody who knows how to cook, and its use presupposes somebody who already knows how to use it, and just as a scientific hypothesis springs from a knowledge of how to conduct a scientific investigation and separated from that knowledge is powerless to set empiricism profitably to work, so a political ideology must be understood, not as an independently premeditated beginning for political activity, but as knowledge (abstract and generalized) of a concrete manner of attending to the arrangements of a society. The catechism which sets out the purposes to be pursued merely abridges a concrete manner of behaviour in which those purposes are already hidden. It does not exist in advance of political activity, and by itself it is always an insufficient guide. Political enterprises, the ends to be pursued, the arrangements to be established (all the normal ingredients of a political ideology), cannot be premeditated in advance of a manner of attending to the arrangements of a society; what we do, and moreover what we want to do, is the creature of how we are accustomed to conduct our affairs. Indeed, it often reflects no more than a dis­covered ability to do something which is then translated into an authority to do it.

Literature before the Renaissance had frequently offered ideal patterns for living which were dominated by the ethos of the church, but after the Reformation the search for individual expression and meaning took over. Institutions were questioned and re-evaluated, often while being praised at the same time. But where there had been conventional modes of expression, reflecting ideal modes of behaviour - religious, heroic, or social - Renaissance writing explored the geography of the human soul, redefining its relationship with authority, history, science, and the future. This involved experimentation with form and genre, and an enormous variety of linguistic and literary innovations in a short period of time. Reason, rather than religion, was the driving force in this search for rules to govern human behaviour in the Renaissance world. The power and mystique of religion had been overthrown in one bold stroke: where the marvellous no longer holds sway, real life has to provide explanations. Man, and the use he makes of his powers, capabilities, and free will, is thus the subject matter of Renaissance literature, from the early sonnets modelled on Petrarch to the English epic which closes the period, Paradise Lost, published after the Restoration, when the Renaissance had long finished. The Reformation gave cultural, philosophical, and ideological impetus to English Renaissance writing. The writers in the century following the Reformation had to explore and redefine all the concerns of humanity. In a world where old assumptions were no longer valid, where scientific discoveries questioned age-old hypotheses, and where man rather than God was the central interest, it was the writers who reflected and attempted to respond to the disintegration of former certainties. For it is when the universe is out of control that it is at its most frightening - and its most stimulating. There would never again be such an atmosphere of creative tension in the country. What was created was a language, a literature, and a national and international identity.

Discussion of psychological warfare remains controversial because reexamination of its record leads in short order to a heretical conclusion: The role of the United States in world affairs during our lifetimes has often been rapacious, destructive, tolerant of genocide, and willing to sacrifice countless people in the pursuit of a chimera of security that has grown ever more remote. Rethinking psychological warfare's role in communication studies, in turn, requires reconsideration of where contemporary Western ideology comes from, whose interests it serves, and the role that social scientists play in its propagation. Such discussions have always upset those who are content with the present order of things. For the rest of us, though, they permit a glimmer of hope.

Recall that the collapse of complexity that accompanies 5 percent [i.e. intractable] conflicts happens along many dimensions: - A very complication situation becomes very simple. - A focus on concrete details in the conflict shifts to matters of general abstract principle. - Concerns over obtaining accurate information regarding substantive issues transform into concerns over defending one's identity, ideology, and values. - The out-group, which was seen as made up of many different types of individuals, now are all alike. - The in-group, which was seen as made up of many different types of individuals, now are all similar. - Whereas I once held many contradictions within myself in terms of what I valued, thought, and did; now I am always consistent in this conflict. - Whereas I used to feel different things about this conflict - good, bad, and ambivalent; now I feel only an overwhelming sense of enmity and hate. - I've shifted from long-term thinking and planning toward short-term reactions and concerns. - Where I once had many action options available to me, I now have one: attack. This is the bad news about the 5 percent, but it's also the good news. The collapse of complexity occurs on so many levels, all leading to a similar state of 'us versus them' thinking, that reintroducing a sense of complexity and agency can also be achieved in a wide variety of ways. There are therefore many places to find points of leverage to rupture the certainty and oversimplification that rules in these situations. The question is how to find them.

The fundamental problem is that every technology embeds the ideologies of its creators! Who made the Internet? The military! The Internet is the product of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency! We call it DARPA for short! Who worked for DARPA? DARPA was a bunch of men! Not a single woman worked on the underlying technologies that fuel our digital universe! Men are the shit of the world and all of our political systems and philosophies were created and devised without the input of women! Half of the world’s population lives beneath systems of government and technological innovation into which their gender had zero input! Democracy is a bullshit ideology that a bunch of slaveholding Greek men constructed between rounds of beating their wives! All the presumed ideologies of men were taken for inescapable actualities and designed into the Internet! Packet switching is an incredible evil!

The national idea . . . [that] regarded the frontiers of the state as being determined by the natural boundaries of the nation, is now transformed into the notion of elevating one’s own nation above all others. The ideal now is to secure for one’s own nation the domination of the world, an aspiration which is as unbounded as the capitalist lust for profit from which it springs. . . . These efforts become an economic necessity, because every failure to advance reduces the profit and the competitiveness of finance capital, and may finally turn the smaller economic territory into a mere tributary of a larger one. . . . Since the subjugation of foreign nations takes place by force—that is, in a perfectly natural way—it appears to the ruling nation that this domination is due to some special natural qualities, in short to its racial characteristics. Thus there emerges a racist ideology, cloaked in the garb of natural science, a justification for finance capital’s lust for power, which is thus shown to have the specificity and necessity of a natural phenomenon.

According to the corporate media, which allows all shades of opinion from the far right to the middle-of-the-road, America has vicious enemies on all continents (except maybe Antarctica). These Evildoers, driven by Satan, want to destroy us and take all we own. Hence, by this analysis, our president must have no compunction about spilling blood; in short, like it or not, he must have the soul--or soullessness--of a serial killer. A rival "leftish" view, banned from the corporate media but widely available on Internet, holds that the world does not consist entirely of endless enemies, but does contain many, many peoples who want to get out from under the heel of the IMF, the World Bank and the multi-nationals. "Our" government, in this view, actually belongs not to us but to these giant money-cows, who finance the two major parties and ensure that no third party ever gets decent coverage in their media. The government then acts as Company Cop for the rich, suppressing all attempts at rebellion or national liberation, etc. Thus, once again, via a dissenting ideology, we arrive at the conclusion that the president must think, feel and act like a serial killer.

The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, myth There was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953), and in part by J. K. Johnstone’s The Bloomsbury Group (1954). The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf ’s writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis. James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954), and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian ‘moment’ in terms of ‘short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf ’s use of the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough’. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner’s 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962). The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1962); translated by Jean Stewart, 1965) was the first full-length study ofWoolf ’s oeuvre, and it stood for a long time as the standard work of critical reference in Woolf studies. Guiguet draws on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to put forward a philosophical reading of Woolf; and he also introduces a psychobiographical dimension in the non-self.’ This existentialist approach did not foreground Woolf ’s feminism, either. his heavy use of extracts from A Writer’s Diary. He lays great emphasis on subjectivism in Woolf ’s writing, and draws attention to her interest in the subjective experience of ‘the moment.’ Despite his philosophical apparatus, Guiguet refuses to categorise Woolf in terms of any one school, and insists that Woolf has indeed ‘no pretensions to abstract thought: her domain is life, not ideology’. Her avoidance of conventional character makes Woolf for him a ‘purely psychological’ writer.5 Guiguet set a trend against materialist and historicist readings ofWoolf by his insistence on the primacy of the subjective and the psychological: ‘To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and

Yet, it was precisely our failure to differentiate between work and politics, between reality and illusion; it was precisely our mistake of conceiving of politics as a rational human activity comparable to the sowing of seeds or the construction of buildings that was responsible for the fact that a painter who failed to make the grade was able to plunge the whole world into misery. And I have stressed again and again that the main purpose of this book—which, after all, was not written merely for the fun of it—was to demonstrate these catastrophic errors in human thinking and to eliminate irrationalism from politics. It is an essential part of our social tragedy that the farmer, the industrial worker, the physician, etc., do not influence social existence solely through their social activities, but also and even predominantly through their political ideologies. For political activity hinders objective and professional activity; it splits every profession into inimical ideologic groups; creates a dichotomy in the body of industrial workers; limits the activity of the medical profession and harms the patients. In short, it is precisely political activity that prevents the realization of that which it pretends to fight for: peace, work, security, international cooperation, free objective speech, freedom of religion, etc.

Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; it’s moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese English. But the ideologies stay in their places. They do not spread like the swine flu, or through sexual contact. They spread through books and films and things of that nature. The dictatorships of Latin America used to ban books, they used to burn them, just like Franco did, like Pope Gregory IX and Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Now they don’t have to because the best place to hide ideologies is in books. The dictatorships are mostly gone—Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. The military juntas. Our ideologies are not secrets. Even the Ku Klux Klan holds open meetings in Alabama like a church. None of the Communists are still in jail. You can buy Mao’s red book at the gift shop at the Museum of Communism. I will die soon, in the next five to ten years. I have not seen progress during my lifetime. Our lives are too short and disposable. If we had longer life expectancies, if we lived to 200, would we work harder to preserve life or, do you think that when Borges said, ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe in only those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive,’ we would simply alter it to say ‘first two centuries’? I have heard people say we are living in a golden age, but the golden age has passed—I’ve seen it in the churches all over Latin America where the gold is like glue. The Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages but only because they are forgotten, because the past is shrouded in darkness, because as we lay one century of life on top of the next, everything that has come before seems old and dark—technological advances provide the illusion of progress. The most horrendous tortures carried out in the past are still carried out today, only today the soldiers don’t meet face to face, no one is drawn and quartered, they take a pill and silently hope a heart attack doesn’t strike them first. We are living in the age of dissociation, speaking a government-patented language of innocence—technology is neither good nor evil, neither progress nor regress, but the more advanced it becomes, the more we will define this era as the one of transparent secrets, of people living in a world of open, agile knowledge, oceans unpoliced—all blank faces, blank minds, blank computers, filled with our native programming, using electronic appliances with enough memory to store everything ever written invented at precisely the same moment we no longer have the desire to read a word of it.

The history of another country, one Americans don’t much like comparing themselves with, illustrates the grave dangers of yoking political ideology to dubious science. In the 1930s under Joseph Stalin, the quack “scientist” Trofim Lysenko, who promoted himself through party newspapers rather than rigorous experiments, rose to prominence and took control of Soviet biological, medical, and agricultural research for several decades. Lysenko used his power to prosecute an ideologically driven crusade against the theory of genetics, which he denounced as a bourgeois affront to socialism. In short, his political presuppositions led him to embrace bogus scientific claims. In the purges that followed, many of Lysenko’s scientist critics lost their jobs and suffered imprisonment and even execution. By 1948 Lysenko had convinced Stalin to ban the study of genetics. Soviet science suffered immeasurable damage from the machinations of Lysenko and his henchmen, and the term “Lysenkoism” has since come to signify the suppression of, or refusal to acknowledge, science for ideological reasons. In a democracy like our own, Lysenkoism is unlikely to take such a menacing, totalitarian form. Nevertheless, the threat we face from conservative abuse of science—to informed policymaking, to democratic discourse, and to knowledge itself—is palpably real. And as the modern Right and the Bush administration flex their muscles and continue to battle against reliable, mainstream conclusions and sources of information, this threat is growing.

Contrary to “the mantra,” White supremacists are the ones supporting policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost—more than every other American war combined. White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be—and still is—teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support. White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it’s more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence.

There is an excellent short book (126 pages) by Faustino Ballvè, Essentials of Economics (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education), which briefly summarizes principles and policies. A book that does that at somewhat greater length (327 pages) is Understanding the Dollar Crisis by Percy L. Greaves (Belmont, Mass.: Western Islands, 1973). Bettina Bien Greaves has assembled two volumes of readings on Free Market Economics (Foundation for Economic Education). The reader who aims at a thorough understanding, and feels prepared for it, should next read Human Action by Ludwig von Mises (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1949, 1966, 907 pages). This book extended the logical unity and precision of economics beyond that of any previous work. A two-volume work written thirteen years after Human Action by a student of Mises is Murray N. Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State (Mission, Kan.: Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, 1962, 987 pages). This contains much original and penetrating material; its exposition is admirably lucid; and its arrangement makes it in some respects more suitable for textbook use than Mises’ great work. Short books that discuss special economic subjects in a simple way are Planning for Freedom by Ludwig von Mises (South Holland, 111.: Libertarian Press, 1952), and Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). There is an excellent pamphlet by Murray N. Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? (Santa Ana, Calif.: Rampart College, 1964, 1974, 62 pages). On the urgent subject of inflation, a book by the present author has recently been published, The Inflation Crisis, and How to Resolve It (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1978). Among recent works which discuss current ideologies and developments from a point of view similar to that of this volume are the present author’s The Failure of the “New Economics”: An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies (Arlington House, 1959); F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1945) and the same author’s monumental Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). Ludwig von Mises’ Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936, 1969) is the most thorough and devastating critique of collectivistic doctrines ever written. The reader should not overlook, of course, Frederic Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms (ca. 1844), and particularly his essay on “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” Those who are interested in working through the economic classics might find it most profitable to do this in the reverse of their historical order. Presented in this order, the chief works to be consulted, with the dates of their first editions, are: Philip Wicksteed, The Common Sense of Political Economy, 1911; John Bates Clark, The Distribution of Wealth, 1899; Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, The Positive Theory of Capital, 1888; Karl Menger, Principles of Economics, 1871; W. Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 1871; John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848; David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817; and Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776.

Even in those natural sciences which appeared to be directly relevant to society and its concerns, the social and political element was often crucial. In our period this was plainly the case in those fields of biology which touched directly on social man, and all those which could be linked with the concept of 'evolution' and the increasingly politicized name of Charles Darwin. Both carried a high ideological charge. In the form of racism, whose central role in the nineteenth century cannot be overemphasized, biology was essential to a theoretically egalitarian bourgeois ideology, since it passed "the blame for visible human inequalities from society to 'nature'. The poor were poor because born inferior. Hence biology was not only potentially the science of the political right, but the science of those who suspected science, reason and progress. Few thinkers were more sceptical of the mid-nineteenth-century verities, including science, than the philosopher Nietzsche. Yet his own writings, and notably his most ambitious work, The Will to Power, can be read as a variant of Social Darwinism, a discourse conducted in the language of 'natural selection', in this instance selection destined to' produce a new race of 'superman' who will dominate human inferiors as man in nature dominates and exploits brute creation. And the links between biology and ideology are indeed particularly evident in the interplay between 'eugenics' and the new science of 'genetics', which virtually came into existence around 1900, receiving its name from William Bateson shortly thereafter (1905).

The intellectual justification for transphobia on the left is usually framed as concern about a mythological 'trans ideology', which is individualist, bourgeois and unconcerned with class struggle. As we've seen, however, the majority of trans people are working class, and the oppression of trans people is specifically rooted in capitalism. In short, capitalism across the world still relies heavily on the idea of different categories of men's work and women's work, in which "women's work" (such as housework, child-rearing, and emotional labour) is either poorly paid or not paid at all. In order for this categorization to function, it needs to rest on a clear idea of how to divide men and women. Capitalism also requires a certain level of unemployment to function. If there were enough work to go round, no worker would worry about losing their job, and all workers could demand higher wages and better conditions. The ever-present spectre of unemployment, on the other hand, enables employers to dictate conditions. Equally, in terms of severe crisis this 'reserve army' of unemployed people can be called into employment as and when the economy requires it. This system of deliberate unemployment needs ways to mark who will work and who will be left unemployed. In our society this is principally achieved through race, class, gender, and disability. Social exclusion and revulsion at the existence of trans people usefully provides another class of people more likely to be left in the ranks of the unemployed (even more so if they are trans and poor, black, or disabled - which is why unemployment is highest among these trans people).

If we consider this official or elite multiculturalism as an ideological state apparatus we can see it as a device for constructing and ascribing political subjectivities and agencies for those who are seen as legitimate and full citizens and others who are peripheral to this in many senses. There is in this process an element of racialized ethnicization, which whitens North Americans of European origins and blackens or darkens their 'others' by the same stroke. This is integral to Canadian class and cultural formation and distribution of political entitlement. The old and established colonial/racist discourses of tradition and modernity, civilization and savagery, are the conceptual devices of the construction and ascription of these racialized ethnicities. It is through these 'conceptual practices of power' (Smith, 1990) that South Asians living in Canada, for example, can be reified as hindu or muslim, in short as religious identities.....We need to repeat that there is nothing natural or primordial about cultural identities - religious or otherwise - and their projection as political agencies. In this multiculturalism serves as a collection of cultural categories for ruling or administering, claiming their representational status as direct emanations of social ontologies. This allows multiculturalism to serve as an ideology, both in the sense of a body of content, claiming that 'we' or 'they' are this or that kind of cultural identities, as well as an epistemological device for occluding the organization of the social....an interpellating device which segments the nation's cultural and political space as well as its labour market into ethnic communities....Defined thus, third world or non-white peoples living in Canada become organized into competitive entities with respect to each other. They are perceived to have no commonality, except that they are seen as, or self-appellate as, being essentially religious, traditional or pre-modern, and thus civilizationally backward. This type of conceptualization of political and social subjectivity or agency allows for no cross-border affiliation or formation, as for example does the concept of class.

We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren't any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past -- Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens -- inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and lumsy to our contemporary percetption. The trouble lies in the way these classical evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers and they know their souls are black. And they reason: "I cannot live unless I do evil. So I'll set my father against my brother! I'll drink the victim's sufferings until I'm drunk with them!" Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate. But no; that's not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human beingto seek a justifaction for his actions. Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble -- and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they have no ideology. Ideology-- that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad and in his own and other's eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will received praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their weills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Mother-land; the conolizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; it’s moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese English. But the ideologies stay in their places. They do not spread like the swine flu, or through sexual contact. They spread through books and films and things of that nature. The dictatorships of Latin America used to ban books, they used to burn them, just like Franco did, like Pope Gregory IX and Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Now they don’t have to because the best place to hide ideologies is in books. The dictatorships are mostly gone—Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. The military juntas. Our ideologies are not secrets. Even the Ku Klux Klan holds open meetings in Alabama like a church. None of the Communists are still in jail. You can buy Mao’s red book at the gift shop at the Museum of Communism. I will die soon, in the next five to ten years. I have not seen progress during my lifetime. Our lives are too short and disposable. If we had longer life expectancies, if we lived to 200, would we work harder to preserve life or, do you think that when Borges said, ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe in only those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive,’ we would simply alter it to say ‘first two centuries’? I have heard people say we are living in a golden age, but the golden age has passed—I’ve seen it in the churches all over Latin America where the gold is like glue. The Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages but only because they are forgotten, because the past is shrouded in darkness, because as we lay one century of life on top of the next, everything that has come before seems old and dark—technological advances provide the illusion of progress. The most horrendous tortures carried out in the past are still carried out today, only today the soldiers don’t meet face to face, no one is drawn and quartered, they take a pill and silently hope a heart attack doesn’t strike them first. We are living in the age of dissociation, speaking a government-patented language of innocence—technology is neither good nor evil, neither progress nor regress, but the more advanced it becomes, the more we will define this era as the one of transparent secrets, of people living in a world of open, agile knowledge, oceans unpoliced—all blank faces, blank minds, blank computers, filled with our native programming, using electronic appliances with enough memory to store everything ever written invented at precisely the same moment we no longer have the desire to read a word of it.” ― John M. Keller, Abracadabrantesque

Within a few short, dramatic months Afghanistan had been catapulted into the centre of the intensified Cold War between the Soviet Union and the USA. The Afghan Mujaheddin were to become the US-backed, anti-Soviet shock troops. But for the Afghans the Soviet invasion was yet another attempt by outsiders to subdue them and replace their time-honoured religion and society with an alien ideology and social system. The jihad took on a new momentum as the USA, China and Arab states poured in money and arms supplies to the Mujaheddin. Out of this conflict, which was to claim 1.5 million Afghan lives and only end when Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, would emerge a second generation of Mujaheddin who called themselves Taliban (or the students of Islam.)

To sum up what is most crucial in Japanese political culture: the Japanese have never been encouraged to think that the force of an idea could measure up to the physical forces of a government. The key to understanding Japanese power relations is that they are unregulated by transcendental concepts. The public has no intellectual means to a consistent judgement of the political aspects of life. The weaker, ideologically inspired political groups or individuals have no leverage of any kind over the status quo other than the little material pressure they are sometimes able to muster. In short, Japanese political practice is a matter of ‘might is right’ disguised by assurances and tokens of ‘benevolence’.

In considering such transformations the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic – in short, ideological – forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

Mannheim’s paradox’, namely, that we cannot expose a viewpoint as ideological without ourselves adopting an ideological viewpoint.

What I find particularly hypocritical and dishonest is the suggestion that secularism is synonym for “doubt” and “tolerance”, as opposed to the certainty and intolerance of religion. Since the French Revolution, secularism, when translated into social or political action, has hardly been a synonym for tolerance and scepticism, but has been instead unfailingly characterised by a presumption to occupy the moral high ground which entitles to deal out moral judgments. This self-righteousness has often extended to a point that its proponents have not hesitated to execute those who dare to dissent from the new received orthodoxy, with an unwavering certainty that they are fulfilling the momentous mission of promoting social and moral progress. It is perhaps worth reminding that communism – an ideological monster responsible for, within just a few short decades, mass murders on a scale previously unprecedented in human history – is a political manifestation of the idea of a secular society. Marxist communist ideologies are intrinsically linked to the notion of a state sponsored, and enforced, secularism. 3 Communism has never struck me as particularly tolerant or imbued with scepticism. It is indeed a shame that the ruthless dictators of state atheism – such as Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot - before butchering tens of millions of people, did not doubt for an instant of doing the right thing.

irritatingly moralistic. Democratic globalism sees as the engine of history not the will to power but the will to freedom. And while it has been attacked as a dreamy, idealistic innovation, its inspiration comes from the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the Kennedy inaugural of 1961, and Reagan’s “evil empire” speech of 1983. They all sought to recast a struggle for power between two geopolitical titans into a struggle between freedom and unfreedom, and yes, good and evil. Which is why the Truman Doctrine was heavily criticized by realists like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan—and Reagan was vilified by the entire foreign policy establishment for the sin of ideologizing the Cold War by injecting a moral overlay. That was then. Today, post-9/11, we find ourselves in a similar existential struggle but with a different enemy: not Soviet communism, but Arab-Islamic totalitarianism, both secular and religious. Bush and Blair are similarly attacked for naïvely and crudely casting this struggle as one of freedom versus unfreedom, good versus evil. Now, given the way not just freedom but human decency were suppressed in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the two major battles of this new war, you would have to give Bush and Blair’s moral claims the decided advantage of being obviously true. Nonetheless, something can be true and still be dangerous. Many people are deeply uneasy with the Bush-Blair doctrine—many conservatives in particular. When Blair declares in his address to Congress: “The spread of freedom is … our last line of defense and our first line of attack,” they see a dangerously expansive, aggressively utopian foreign policy. In short, they see Woodrow Wilson. Now, to a conservative, Woodrow Wilson is fightin’ words. Yes, this vision is expansive and perhaps utopian. But it ain’t Wilsonian. Wilson envisioned the spread of democratic values through as-yet-to-be invented international institutions. He could be forgiven for that. In 1918, there was no way to know how utterly corrupt and useless those international institutions would turn out to be. Eight decades of bitter experience later—with Libya chairing the UN Commission on Human Rights—there is no way not to know. Democratic globalism is not Wilsonian. Its attractiveness is precisely that it shares realism’s insights about the centrality of power. Its attractiveness is precisely that it has appropriate contempt for the fictional legalisms of liberal internationalism. Moreover, democratic globalism is an improvement over realism. What it can teach realism is that the spread of democracy is not just an end but a means, an indispensable means for securing American interests. The reason is simple. Democracies are inherently more friendly to the United States, less belligerent to their neighbors and generally more inclined to peace. Realists are right that to protect your interests you often have to go around the world bashing bad guys over the head. But that technique, no matter how satisfying, has its limits. At some point, you have to implant something, something organic and self-developing. And that something is democracy. But where? V. DEMOCRATIC REALISM The danger of democratic globalism is its universalism, its open-ended commitment to human freedom, its temptation to plant the flag of democracy everywhere. It must learn to say no. And indeed, it does say no. But when it says no to Liberia, or Congo, or Burma, or countenances alliances with authoritarian rulers in places like Pakistan

İn ordinary life we don’t give it more attention, but our emotions, mind-set, expectations and the content in which our sensations occur all have a profound influence on perception. It is experimentally proven fact that people who are warned that they are about to taste something bad rate what they do taste more negatively than people who are told that the taste won’t be so bad. Similarly, people who see images of the same baby rate it as stronger and bigger when they are told it is a boy as opposed to when they are told it is a girl. Most of us don’t have so-called free will, as we suppose that we have. Our emotions, expectations and sensations are controlled by others through different forms of ideology — history, religion, political doctrine and so on. They determine where and how your mind should set in order to perceive what is going around you ‘correctly‘. After all that regulation your brain and mind get a chance to function ‘independently’. Your freedom is hidden there. Let me introduce you to the amazing experiment from psychology. In short, in one study 12 students are sent to test a research hypothesis concerning maze learning in rats. Although it was not initially revealed to students, indeed, the students themselves were the object of this experiment but not the rats they were going to examine. 6 of the students were randomly told that the rats they would be testing had been bred to be highly intelligent, whereas the other 6 students were led to believe that the rats had been bred to be unintelligent. However, in reality there were no differences among the rats given to the two groups of students. When the students returned with their data, the result was fascinating. The rats run by students who expected them to be intelligent showed significantly better maze learning than the rats run by students who expected them to be unintelligent. What had happened? All rats were only rats without any intelligence, but there was substantial difference among brains, that is, the ways how they had been manipulated. Somehow the brain manipulation influenced on the mind, despite of the fact that all of them followed, at least it seemed so, the same conditions of the experiment. Familiar situation, isn’t it? There is no apparent intention for subjective interpretation of input signals receiving by the brain, there is even no subjective awareness that your brain might be under any manipulation, whereas your brain and mind are subtly controlled and manipulated to a considerable extent by others through various form of ideologies and you automatically feel, perceive, think and act according to them, as do true bio-social robots.

During a world war, when fascist ideology idealizes strength and ruthlessness, Eddie represents an entirely different worldview and moral code. He is not an example of the survival of the fittest, but instead is a weak man who overcomes the overwhelming odds set against him. A greater failure than any other character Brennan ever played, Eddie draws strength from Harry and is redeemed. He is the common man, the little man, the derelict, the hanger-on, the socially marginal—in short, everything the Nazis deemed worthy of extermination. He is a fool attached to a wise man. Eddie is the underside of society that fascist ideology dismissed as unworthy to exist. He is unhealthy and dependent on charity, and yet he is an indispensable part of the humanity that Harry Morgan cannot detach himself from.

To read and appreciate the writers of centuries past, one must value the hard grace of human language. While it can feed us, like wheat, it is also quick to dump the chaff of ideology, remaining remarkably resistant to our tinkering. The difficulty is that we must tinker, because if a language does not change, it becomes a dead tongue. Where the ideologues on both the liberal and conservative sides of the issue of inclusive language seem to fall short is in humility, accepting the fact that language is more than a tool for transmitting ideas, and that even the most well-intentioned people cannot control a living tongue.

The modern ideology is compounded of human rights, equality, individuality, minimization of suffering and maximization of self-respect, diversity, inclusion and a strong emphasis on nontraditional sexual self-expression and identity. But the point is not so much these positive doctrines as the negative ones: this-life is all there is, and there is no meaning to life beyond the happiness or misery experienced; there is no objectivity to morality, humans are existentially alone and communication is uncertain and mostly a matter of self-deception. In sum, the modern ideology is secular and nihilistic, and modern people are short-termist, pleasure-orientated, and alienated.

The American sociologist Barrington Moore proposed a longer-term explanation for the emergence of military dictatorship in Japan. Seeking the ultimate roots of dictatorship and democracy in different routes toward the capitalist transformation of agriculture, Moore noted that Britain allowed an independent rural gentry to enclose its estates and expel from the countryside “surplus” labor who were then “free” to work in its precocious industries. British democracy could rest upon a stable, conservative countryside and a large urban middle class fed by upwardly mobile labor. Germany and Japan, by contrast, industrialized rapidly and late while maintaining unchanged a traditional landlord-peasant agriculture. Thereafter they were obliged to hold in check all at once fractious workers, squeezed petty bourgeois, and peasants, either by force or by manipulation. This conflict-ridden social system, moreover, provided only limited markets for its own products. Both Germany and Japan dealt with these challenges by combining internal repression with external expansion, aided by the slogans and rituals of a right-wing ideology that sounded radical without really challenging the social order. To Barrington Moore’s long-term analysis of lopsided modernization, one could add further short-term twentieth-century similarities between the German and Japanese situations: the vividness of the perception of a threat from the Soviet Union (Russia had made territorial claims against Japan since the Japanese victory of 1905), and the necessity to adapt traditional political and social hierarchies rapidly to mass politics. Imperial Japan was even more successful than Nazi Germany in using modern methods of mobilization and propaganda to integrate its population under traditional authority. Moore’s perceived similarities between German and Japanese development patterns and social structures have not been fully convincing to Japan specialists. Agrarian landlords cannot be shown to have played a major role in giving imperial Japan its peculiar mix of expansionism and social control. And if imperial Japanese techniques of integration were very successful, it was mostly because Japanese society was so coherent and its family structure so powerful. Imperial Japan, finally, despite undoubted influence from European fascism and despite some structural analogies to Germany and Italy, faced less critical problems than those two countries. The Japanese faced no imminent revolutionary threat, and needed to overcome neither external defeat nor internal disintegration (though they feared it, and resented Western obstacles to their expansion in Asia). Though the imperial regime used techniques of mass mobilization, no official party or autonomous grassroots movement competed with the leaders. The Japanese empire of the period 1932–45 is better understood as an expansionist military dictatorship with a high degree of state-sponsored mobilization than as a fascist regime.

Mindfulness, neuroplasticity, trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy, psychoanalysis, career coaching, Kripalu yoga – the list of “cures” for our lack of resilience and related problems is endless. If you are overweight, alone, miserable at work or crippled by stress or anxiety or depression, there are hordes of gurus and experts chasing you with books and quick fixes. With their advice, guidance, motivation or inspiration, you can fix your problems. But make no mistake: They are always your problems. You alone are responsible for them. It follows that failing to fix your problems will always be your failure, your lack of will, motivation or strength. Galen, the second-century physician who ministered to Roman emperors, believed his medical treatments were effective. “All who drink of this treatment recover in a short time,” he wrote, “except those whom it does not help, who all die. It is obvious, therefore, that it fails only in incurable cases.” This is the way of the billion-dollar self-help industry: You are to blame when the guru’s advice does not produce the expected outcome, and by now, we are all familiar enough with self-help to know that expected outcomes are elusive. […] Personal explanations for success actually set us up for failure. TED Talks and talk shows full of advice on what to eat, what to think and how to live seldom work. Self-help fixes are like empty calories: The effects are fleeting and often detrimental in the long term. Worse, they promote victim blaming. The notion that your resilience is your problem alone is ideology, not science. We have been giving people the wrong message. Resilience is not a DIY endeavor. Self-help fails because the stresses that put our lives in jeopardy in the first place remain in the world around us even after we’ve taken the “cures.” The fact is that people who can find the resources they require for success in their environments are far more likely to succeed than individuals with positive thoughts and the latest power poses. […] The science of resilience is clear: The social, political and natural environments in which we live are far more important to our health, fitness, finances and time management than our individual thoughts, feelings or behaviors.

We need to change the ways in which we talk about humanity and the environment and in order to do so, we need to change the way in which we think about them, not an easy task given that we use language to think and our languages make us conceive the environment as detached. A possible way out to help us approach problems, without being drawn back by the mental models that fail us, is Systems Dynamics (Meadows 2008; Sterman 2012). Unfortunately, Sterman explains, most efforts made by individuals and institutions to enhance sustainability are directed at the symptoms and not at the causes and systems (any system) will respond to any change introduced with what is known as ‘policy resistance’, that is the existing system will tend to react to change in ways that we had not intended when we first designed the intervention (a few examples are road-building programs designed to reduce congestion that ends up increasing traffic or antibiotics that stimulate the evolution of drug-resistant pathogens—for a longer list and further explanation see Sterman 2012, 24). Systems Dynamics allows us to calculate scientifically the way in which a complex system will react to change and to account beforehand for what we usually describe as ‘side-effects’. Side effects, Sterman argues, ‘are not a feature of reality but a sign that the boundaries of our mental models are too narrow, our time horizons too short’ (24). As Gonella et al. (2019) explain: ”As long as we consider the geobiosphere as a sub-system (a resources provider) of the human-made economic system, any attempt to fix environmental and social problems by keeping the business as usual, i.e., the mantra of economic growth, will fail. The reality tells us the reverse: geobiosphere is not a sub-system of the economy, economy is a sub-system of geobiosphere. As systems thinkers know, trying to keep alive at any cost the operation of a sub-system will give rise to a re-arrangement of the super-system – the geobiosphere – that will self-reorganize to absorb and make ineffective our attempt, then continuing its own way.” (Gonella et al. 2019)

If we cannot justify the very concept of the aesthetic, except as ideology, then aesthetic judgement is without philosophical foundation. An ‘ideology’ is adopted for its social or political utility, rather than its truth. And

Roughly half of all American Catholic teens now lose their Catholic identity before they turn thirty. The reasons are varied. Today’s mass media, both in entertainment and in news, offer a steady diet of congenial, practical atheism, highlighting religious hypocrisy and cultivating consumer appetite. As one study noted, many young adults assume that “science and logic are how we ‘really’ know things about our world, and religious faith either violates or falls short of the standards of scientific knowledge.”8 Others have been shaped by theories trickling down from universities through high schools into a vulgarized, “simple-minded ideology presupposing the cultural construction of everything” and fostering an uncritical moral relativism.9 But the example of parents remains a key factor—often the key factor—in shaping young adult beliefs. The family is the main transmitter of religious convictions. Disrupting the family disrupts an entire cultural ecology.

I read about it in Buck Up, Suck Up . . . and Come Back When You Foul Up: 12 Winning Secrets from the War Room, written by James Carville and Paul Begala, the political strategists behind Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign “war room.” Here’s the excerpt that stuck with me: Newt Gingrich is one of the most successful political leaders of our time. Yes, we disagreed with virtually everything he did, but this is a book about strategy, not ideology. And we’ve got to give Newt his due. His strategic ability—his relentless focus on capturing the House of Representatives for the Republicans—led to one of the biggest political landslides in American history. Now that he’s in the private sector, Newt uses a brilliant illustration to explain the need to focus on the big things and let the little stuff slide: the analogy of the field mice and the antelope. A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope. The distinction is important. Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice? In the short term it might give you a nice, rewarding feeling. But in the long run you’re going to die. So ask yourself at the end of the day, “Did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?” Another way I often approach this is to look at my to-do list and ask: “Which one of these, if done, would render all the rest either easier or completely irrelevant?

I will not argue with the Fremen claims that they are divinely inspired to transmit a religious revelation. It is their concurrent claim to ideological revelation which inspires me to shower them with derision. Of course, they make the dual claim in the hope that it will strengthen their mandarinate and help them to endure in a universe which finds them increasingly oppressive. It is in the name of all those oppressed people that I warn the Fremen: short-term expediency always fails in the long term. —THE PREACHER AT ARRAKEEN

Newt Gingrich is one of the most successful political leaders of our time. Yes, we disagreed with virtually everything he did, but this is a book about strategy, not ideology. And we’ve got to give Newt his due. His strategic ability—his relentless focus on capturing the House of Representatives for the Republicans—led to one of the biggest political landslides in American history. Now that he’s in the private sector, Newt uses a brilliant illustration to explain the need to focus on the big things and let the little stuff slide: the analogy of the field mice and the antelope. A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope. The distinction is important. Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice? In the short term it might give you a nice, rewarding feeling. But in the long run you’re going to die. So ask yourself at the end of the day, “Did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?” Another way I often approach this is to look at my to-do list and ask: “Which one of these, if done, would render all the rest either easier or completely irrelevant?

The fascination with automation in part reflected the country’s mood in the immediate postwar period, including a solid ideological commitment to technological progress. Representatives of industry (along with their counterparts in science and engineering) captured this mood by championing automation as the next step in the development of new production machinery and American industrial prowess. These boosters quickly built up automation into “a new gospel of postwar economics,” lauding it as “a universal ideal” that would “revolutionize every area of industry.” 98 For example, the November 1946 issue of Fortune magazine focused on the prospects for “The Automatic Factory.” The issue included an article titled “Machines without Men” that envisioned a completely automated factory where virtually no human labor would be needed. 99 With visions of “transforming the entire manufacturing sector into a virtually labor-free enterprise,” factory owners in a range of industries began to introduce automation in the postwar period. 100 The auto industry moved with particular haste. After the massive wave of strikes in 1945–46, automakers seized on automation as a way to replace workers with machines. 101 As they converted back to civilian auto production after World War II, they took the opportunity to install new labor-saving automatic production equipment. The two largest automakers, Ford and General Motors, set the pace. General Motors introduced the first successful automated transfer line at its Buick engine plant in Flint in 1946 (shortly after a 113-day strike, the longest in the industry’s history). The next year Ford established an automation department (a Ford executive, Del S. Harder, is credited with coining the word “automation”). By October 1948 the department had approved $ 3 million in spending on 500 automated devices, with early company estimates predicting that these devices would result in a 20 percent productivity increase and the elimination of 1,000 jobs. Through the late 1940s and 1950s Ford led the way in what became known as “Detroit automation,” undertaking an expensive automation program, which it carried out in concert with the company’s plans to decentralize operations away from the city. A major component of this effort was the Ford plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park, a $ 2 billion engine-making complex that attracted visitors from government, industry, and labor and became a national symbol of automation in the 1950s. 102

From the start, the Left was handicapped by the great ideological differences between its constituent parts. Widest of all was the gap between the parliamentary socialist movement and the anti-parliamentary anarcho-syndicalist CNT. These differences were not a matter of voluntarism or sheer bloody-mindedness, as the standard historical narrative so often implies. Rather, their irreducibility was a result of the vastly different political, economic, and cultural experiences of the Left’s social constituencies in what was a highly unevenly developed country. For example, the direct political action favoured by many anarcho-syndicalists instantly recommended itself to the unskilled and the landless poor, whose lack of bargaining power and social defencelessness made socialist promises of gradual change through the ballot box seem immensely improbable, if not downright incredible.

From numerous angles, wokeness encourages us to distrust the order God has created in the world He has personally made. As an ideology, it reads our society as fundamentally oppressive along racial lines, but often stops short of substantiating this claim. Furthermore, it conflates individual experience with societal structures, training people to read real wrongs done against them as necessarily part of a broader public square campaign. In addition, wokeness is fundamentally an anti-authority system, but as we have noted, it is itself deeply authoritarian. Though it speaks against “oppression,” it actually creates injustice, for it teaches us to distrust God-made order and God-given authority. Though CRT gets most of the headlines, it is in truth intersectionality that really brings the pain. People who will never read a sentence from an intersectional author nevertheless buy into and express an intersectional framework when they view our society as oppressive and read leadership in terms of power imbalances

Until now China has never been a naval power – with its large land mass, multiple borders and short sea routes to trading partners, it had no need to be, and it was rarely ideologically expansive. Its merchants have long sailed the oceans to trade goods, but its navy did not seek territory beyond its region, and the difficulty of patrolling the great sea lanes of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans was not worth the effort. It was always a land power, with a lot of land and a lot of people – now nearly 1.4 billion.

What is the sum of not recognizing the tremendous need for self reflection of all entities of our time. History repeats itself, easily predicted by the primitive parts of psychology. There's only one excuse for inaction, fear, or the lack of foresight. Furthermore, if democracy is the way - a thousand astronomers may be more effective in dealing with issues regarding the stars - and so on. Though perhaps there may be universal issues directly related to the human experience. There's also significant cause for concern with regards to larger variations or differences in lifestyle, preferences/ideologies, merits, psychology and various corruptions which may arise. Favouring the political directions who are able to produce, raise or educate the most babies and then gets to decide the fate of all the rest. There is difficulty in adressing issues when there is a great need for balance between short-term and long-term good. Whatever system of governance, with ways of bringing those carrying the merits, discipline and good hearts to surface like buoyancy, necessary to secure a good future for all. The paradox of calling for the good to rise up - is how those truly good may often fail to recognize their part of the intended audience, being too humble in accepting their own worth. Let's be thankful, for nature lead us to solution. In this case, the birds.

What is the sum of not recognizing the tremendous need for self reflection of all entities in our times. History repeats itself, easily predicted by the primitive parts of psychology. There's only one excuse for inaction, fear, or the lack of foresight. Furthermore, if democracy is the way - a thousand astronomers may be more effective in dealing with issues regarding the stars - and so on. Though perhaps there may be universal issues directly related to the human experience. There's also significant cause for concern with regards to larger variations or differences in lifestyle, preferences/ideologies, merits, psychology and various corruptions which may arise. Favouring the political directions who are able to produce, raise or educate the most babies and then gets to decide the fate of all the rest. There is difficulty in adressing issues when there is a great need for balance between short-term and long-term good. Whatever system of governance, with ways of bringing those carrying the merits, discipline and good hearts to surface like buoyancy, necessary to secure a good future for all. The paradox of calling for the good to rise up - is how those truly good may often fail to recognize their part of the intended audience, being too humble in accepting their own worth. And, to recognize those primitive tendencies of an elevated ego. Let's be thankful, for nature inspire many solutions.

But marriage itself, not to mention the romantic ideology that surrounds it, so easily tends to produce misunderstanding about who’s responsible for whose emotions. It’s almost as if the ideal of passionate fusion that we welcomed so blissfully at the outset returns, like a swamp monster, in the form of chronic confusion about who’s doing what to whom. As time goes on, if people don’t step up to the challenge of communicating in an emotionally healthy way, they fall into the trap of thinking that individual and couple needs are doomed to conflict. They now imagine there’s no way around the unshakable reality of competing agendas. In both cases, people overlook that their way of handling their own emotions powerfully influences the very ways they conceive of, and participate in, marriage. Throughout these pages, we will be looking closely at the individual—not only because it receives short shrift in writings on couples, but because, paradoxically, individual development represents one of the most potent paths to

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

The attraction of doing so is, however, obvious: simplicity, ease, and the illusion of mastery (which can have exceptionally useful psychological and social consequences, particularly in the short term)—and, let us not forget, the frequent discovery of a villain, or set of villains, upon which the hidden motivations for the ideology can be vented.

wrote, “If a Huron’s soul could have inherited Montesquieu’s brain, Montesquieu would still create.” The native North American was an Enlightenment paradigm of the savage, yet if his soul were joined to Montesquieu’s brain, then one of the era’s greatest thinkers would, for intellectual purposes at least, be still alive. It did not matter that the soul and body were those of a “primitive,” provided the brain was the philosopher’s own. In short, the conviction that the brain is the only organ indispensable for personal identity emerged independently or, at most, marginally connected to empirical neuroscientific advances. Bonnet’s 1760 statement about Montesquieu and the Huron declares exactly the same thing as Puccetti’s aphorism of 1969, “Where goes a brain, there goes a person,” or Gazzaniga’s confident assertion of 2005, “you are your brain.” A good number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century (neuro)scientists and (neuro)philosophers claim that their convictions about the self are based on neuroscientific data. That may be so for them personally. Historically, however, things happened the other way around: Brainhood predated reliable neuroscientific discoveries and has all the appearance of having been a motivating factor of brain research. As it advanced, this research legitimized and reinforced the brainhood ideology.

In short, although the excesses of Aryan ideology in Europe would be hard to surpass, the Indians themselves were not averse to attempting to extract political mileage from the Aryan theme to support their own agendas. Indeed, in about 1920, one Visnu Sakharam Pandit filed an immigration court case in America, claiming to be a European. Since immigration was closed to Asiatics at that time, the ingenious fellow said he could prove that he was a Brahman and therefore a fellow Aryan. The argument was even entertained for a while, until a California court ruled that the Aryan invasion theory was precisely that: just a theory, and therefore not citable as credible proof for immigration purposes.

1 Minute Wisdom for Lightworkers in 2021 They will first ridicule you for your independent thinking and observation. Then they will collude, and censor, you for being troublesome and delusional. Then they will attack and slander you to defend their pre-programmed beliefs and ideologies. Then they will lie, in the hope that your different perceptions, have no truth. Then they will ignore you, in the hope that your messages will soon die off. Yet…because of their fixed mindset, they will seldom fully awaken to the “canary in the mine”, until it’s TOO LATE. And then they will shun you in an effort to avoid being reminded, how short-sighted, and delusional, they were. Forgive them – for they are still too unconscious to awaken from their dream. But keep your light shining bright to illuminate the path, just in case, some do awaken from their dark slumber.

Within sentencing, couriers, far more so than many other drug offenders, are routinely blamed for the ills ideologically (and erroneously) attributed to drugs. Couriers were said to be "responsible for the gradual but inexorable degeneration of many of their fellow human beings" who were "contribut[ing] to what is nothing short of the destruction of this society" but "placing a 'lethal weapon' in the hands of drug dealers, wreaking havoc on the streets of our cities" and "tear[ing] at the fabric of our sicety".

The issue of how kin and group selection relate illustrates one striking aspect of the levels of selection debate in biology, which explains why it has captured the attention of philosophers. The debate involves a curious mix of empirical and conceptual questions, often intertwined. At first blush, the levels question may seem purely empirical. Given that natural selection can occur at more than one level, surely we just need to find out the level(s) at which it does occur, or has done in the past? With enough empirical data, surely the question can be straightforwardly answered? In fact, matters are not so simple. Certainly, the debate is responsible to empirical data, but there is more to it than this. For not infrequently, one finds authors who agree about the basic biological facts in a given case, but who disagree about how to identify the level(s) of selection. Such disagreements are not the ‘normal’ scientific ones that can be resolved by collecting data, but have a conceptual, and in some cases even an ideological, dimension.

Change comes when the short-term logic of events, intersects with the long term evolution of ideas.

But the relief policies that England employed during the famine—parsimonious, short-sighted, grotesquely twisted by religion and ideology—produced tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of needless deaths. The intent of those policies may not have been genocidal, but the effects were.

Antifa is not an organized group. It is an ideology and a set of tactics, namely, violently confronting the right wing. Antifa is short for “anti-fascist.” The name is borrowed from World War II–era German anti-Nazi activism. Here in America, the antifa movement became an increasingly large feature of the political scene after Trump’s election. Alt-right groups like the Proud Boys also saw a surge in membership during this time. The two factions brawled in the streets at protests. They fed off each other. Trump and other Republicans spent the second half of 2020 criticizing violence and vandalism from antifa and Black Lives Matter activists during the civil rights demonstrations that erupted around the country after the police killing of George Floyd. Then January 6th took place.

when I gently advised against this, pointing out that the studies would not end until 2024, they became irate. This was my people, my tribe, my whole life, the progressive, right-on part of the ideological world — and it became more and more uncritical, less and less able to discuss or reason. Friends and colleagues who their whole adult lives had known the dangers of Big Pharma (and, reflexively wellness-oriented, would only think of using Burt’s Bees on their babies’ bottoms and sunscreen with no PABAs on themselves) rushed to take the experimental genetic-based therapy; then, like the stone throwers in Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” crowded around to lash out at, shun, punish anyone who raised the slightest question about Big Pharma. Their entire knowledge base about that industry seemed to have magically evaporated into the ether.

Many people lost their livelihoods several times over in the 1990s and 2000s: first their salaried jobs, then a portion (or all) of their livestock owing to rapid privatization during the winter, and finally money invested to launch a business that subsequently failed. Some of the reasons behind the bankruptcies and losses of private entrepreneurs are clear… Upon receiving their livestock, the townspeople panicked and rushed to locate a relative or friend among the herdsmen in the countryside who would agree to take care of their livestock. The herdsmen themselves, however, had not known to prepare extra hay or fences and could provide little help to their relatives from the sedentary center. More disconcerting, many people simply did not understand that privatization signaled the end of the SF jobs and salaries, and that the livestock was given to them to enable them to subsist independently of the state. They either slaughtered and ate their share of the livestock or sold their animals to traders. Some even assumed that the livestock distributed to them was a one-time gift from the state; others thought it was an annual bonus or a reward from the state. Overall, people were confused about the distribution of animals. Purvee lamented to me: ‘No one explained to us that from now on we would be on our own and that the state would not provide us with the services and direction it had for many decades. We did not know that we now had to take care of ourselves, without any support from the state! We did not understand what privatization really meant!”… State socialism… tried to make economic production, transactions, prices, and exchanges as predictable as possible. Because the state was the main and often the only client, the marketability and competitiveness of products were not a concern for CFs so long as they met established standards. Similarly, the CFs were not worried about appealing to buyers, competing with other CFs for customers, or, in general, predicting demand and adjusting their strategies. Although the system limited (and sometimes prevented) individuals and enterprises from making a profit, it also freed people from having to search for a market and from traveling long distances with highly perishable products for which the sales outcome was uncertain. For many, the CFs were a better system than individual domestic herding of private livestock. Of course, the CFs had many shortcomings, both systemically and as individual enterprises. But in the context of post-socialist impoverishment and uncertainty, many herders missed the security and safety that CFs provided… The distinction between the haves and the have-nots was sharpened, but the distance between the two was as short as one zud, flood, or other natural disaster. Without state support, livestock was constantly under threat. For instance, without state extermination brigades, wolves and foxes regularly raided the herds. The price of a bullet almost equaled the price of a sheep, so many herdsmen could not afford to shoot the attackers regularly. Family members took turns guarding their livestock, and it was rare for a nomadic family to pass an uneventful night. Both men and women complained about the backbreaking labor and about not being able to get away from their household duties in order to see a doctor or visit a sick relative in the hospital… The privatization of SFs was a matter not only of property ownership, as Verdery revealed (2004), but also of the ownership of risk, liability, and debt against properties that were losing value. And specific to Mongolia, the new owners also most likely took on a share of the debt. Some of the economic programs instituted during socialism were never intended to generate profit; their purpose was political and ideological—settling the vast land, managing the population, and creating an illusion of prosperity and development…

In short, scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology. The ideology justifies the costs of the research. In exchange, the ideology influences the scientific agenda and determines what to do with the discoveries.

Why is it now that blind obedience to governmental authority is viewed as being a “good citizen,” and resistance to what some see as government tyranny is viewed as “terroristic behavior”? Has all understanding of how this country was formed vanished? Why does the government-run public education system not teach the essential ideologies many of the founders used as justification for the Revolutionary War? Many do not understand these ideas about freedom from tyranny. Each of us should be able to judge our current political climate and issues without only repeating the rhetoric of others. We should be able to form and create our rhetoric by using critical thinking to process all information available to determine our rhetoric and truth.