crypto fairy tales
The term ideology was boosted by Marxists to indicate that part of the superstructure that was all in our heads. In particular it came to refer to false consciousness.
False, that is, in comparison to how the world really operated, and as if ideology could only ever be ideologically incorrect.
I.E a culture might have some code of honour for a martial responsibility that the well-born carried as defenders of the realm because of their loyalty— [to the king who had a divine right to rule, if only because they were descended from the sun] …and that their loyalty was some sort of holy sacrament. When in actuality they went around slaughtering peasants and burning their villages in order to deny material resources to some upstart cousin who was safe in a castle someplace else.
An analogy is that ideology is like the software in our heads, with lots of hidden easter eggs, and the values you hold being various applications. The software/hardware analogy first came to me when I was standing in a counter-reformation wonder that is the cathedral in Oliwa, near Gdansk on the Baltic in the early 90s. Churches were software update repositories but needed to be done every week, so putting them were they got foot-traffic was important.
So when someone is accused of not being ‘ideologically correct’ it means that they need to update their system. And we all know how much fun that can be. After the update the printer stops responding, or the keyboard only types the character ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Issues with this view of ideology as always incorrect view of the world are:
update to whose system exactly - what are they selling and who to?
it can reinforce the potholes of gnosticsm and separatism, where one group is woke enough to know what’s going on, and then the sheeple need to be excluded from the chosen lump of identitarian loyalists.
it in no way interrogates and integrates the human need to build such structures in he first place, structures super- or sub-, hidden or propaganda-ed, correct or fantastical, and in denying or failing to include that notice that we should, we then get stuck in point ② above like some sort of strange loop.
If we do not interrogate it we cannot understand enough to do it better than some sort of holier-than-thou slanging match as an excuse to start slaughtering peasants in the name of some self-trumped-up mountebank or dictator. I.E. the urge to should gets to interfere with the understanding of the shouldiness and we decide some strong psychopath who has no empathy needs to sort it out and bring order. This is a massive fail, including by those efforts which seek to understanding empathy — in literature and narrative studies, if only because they focus on the individual psychology and treatment.
We need to include the worlding urge in our list of psychological ‘traits’, especially in reference to empathy and how the dark triad colonises those processes to give us ‘history’.
To help explain it, or introduce it, I would say it (ideological slanging matches — thou liest) are an example of worldbuilding, at the behest of the moral worlding urge, and as I have said before, that urge does not care about truth values, or a lack of them, because brut survival does not care. (Was it Nietzsche who said we lack an organ for truth?)
I mean truth might exist, but the urge to world morally or otherwise does not care, even as we feel at the urge's behest that the moral urge should care. It’s a strange loop we have difficulty noticing when we go about slaughtering peasants in meat waves to ‘defend’ our empires of psychopathic specialness, being the son of the sun.
Another analogy besides ideology/religion running as software in people’s heads is that we tell stories, and there are whole academic and marketing industries devoted to exploring and exploiting our abilities to tell stories and make things fit into a narrative arc, returning the balance what the justice system cannot provide (and we create worlds in which the moral-urged world then does care, so that, say, monarchy is the best way to preserve order because its more family-orientated (even, apparently, when cousins co-operate in slaughtering peasants when fighting each other about who should be recognised as beloved of heaven).
Particularly when the orphan child wins out.
Academic industries that focus on how story-telling builds and develops empathy among readers is probably the most useful. It needs to focus on worlding more, in order to world well.
Anyway below is one example of where we are close to recognising that we world but then sort of gets lost in that 'fictional' realm:
Sometimes people start out poor, and end up rich. Sometimes this is because they create real net value for the world, and sometimes this is because they gambled, where their wins came from others’ losses. But to the people involved, this difference may not be noticeable. What they see is how they started poor, then initiated many particular risky and effortful activities, had ups and downs which tempted them to quit, but had attitudes that made them persist, and then they finally succeeded.
Such newly rich folks are quite often sensitive to criticism about their wins. They wanted not just wealth but also respect, and so resent skeptical suggestions that they won due to luck, exploitation, or cheating, and so don’t deserve much more respect than others. If they do not deserve their wealth, maybe it should instead be shared with others.
To resist such skepticism, rich folks typically generate key narratives along the way.
by Robin Hanson on overcoming bias.
Originally posted on substack.com, so it predates the start of [taphonomy of worlding] but has been added in there as an entry under ideology.