On Our Failure to Understand Ideology.
Ideology is something we talk about very often, yet remains one of the most misunderstood concepts in contemporary political discourse.
Ideology is almost always framed as something negative, something which one should strive to rid oneself of. It is often associated with dogma, ie. an irrational attachment to provably wrong political beliefs. In this sense “being ideological” most often refers to diverging from the ideology of status quo, itself perceived as ‘non-ideological’ simply for being the belief of the majority (especially true since the ‘end of history’). We see ideology as a spectrum, going from the ‘far right’ to the ‘far left’, with the supposedly reasonable centrists in the middle, capable of seeing past the dogma of the extremes and settling comfortably in between the two.
Yet the reality of ideology is that the more one believes to be free from it, the more one tends to be submerged in it. Ideology is always at its strongest when it is invisible, when it has successfully managed to convince people that it doesn’t exist. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe succinctly put it: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”. Continuing on this train of thought, Ralph Linton also cunningly stated that “The last thing a fish would ever notice would be water”. Let me build on both these observations.
The far right and the far left tend to make no illusions to their ideological inclinations — after all, they are repeatedly singled out for their adherence to ‘extreme ideologies’. The same criticism is never really extended to people in the center, most generally so because the descriptive powers of our society themselves tend to take the position of the status quo. So those who tell us every day what is and isn’t ideology (the media, politicians, business leaders, schools, etc.) conveniently omit to talk about the problematic ideology that is Western capitalist centrism — so let me run you through this fallacy. Here’s a quick recap of what most self-declared ‘non-ideologically aligned’, ‘reasonable’ and ‘level headed’ centrists believe:
Centrism is the ideology which sees no problems in the exploitation of the third world — the one that goes along as if most of what we consume isn’t produced under slave labor conditions in the global south. It is the ideology that is incapable of dealing with rampant climate change due to its strong inclination towards markets as the main societal drivers, leading us towards our imminent doom. It is the ideology that believes in civic rights over human rights, treating non-citizens as non-humans, most commonly observed in its treatment of refugees and immigrants, while claiming to continue the traditions of the Enlightenment. It is the ideology that repeatedly supports and pushes for imperialism in the name of spreading its own ideals as superior to those of ‘backwards countries’ (most often being the countries it colonized, enslaved and exploited for centuries not so long ago and continue to exploit under neo-colonial practices). It is the ideology that sees no harm in allowing corporations to outsource domestic industries to foreign nations with cheaper labor at the detriment of both domestic workers and foreign workers (the former finding itself destitute of its livelihood, the latter finding itself working under slave-like conditions for multinational corporations who exploit the fact that their countries haven’t been able to implement proper worker’s rights, often due to most having lived for decades under authoritarian rule supported by Western powers). It is the ideology of mass consumption, believing that infinite growth is a sound economic strategy, to the direct detriment of our environment and our happiness as it claims that personal fulfillment can be achieved through material possessions (hint: it usually doesn’t).
To use the analysis of Guy Debord, while we usually have no problem identifying ‘concentrated’ ideologies — those represented in strong state figures such as Stalin or Hitler - we in the West do not grasp that of ‘defused’ ideologies: those that are integrated in the very fabric of our social, economic and political modes of being, acting, consuming and producing, permeated throughout our belief systems, our culture, our media, our ‘superior’ political systems, our discourse articulation and our skewed representation of all that is the ‘other’.
Our defused ideology is the water and we are the fishes. It is seen in offices buying plastic plants to imitate a fake natural environment, in coffee shop chains putting up red brick wall wallpaper or fake wood wallpaper on their walls to imitate a rustic, authentic, non-corporate atmosphere. It is when meat packages or fast food chains display a cartoon drawing of a happy cow or a happy chicken, while billions of them get slaughtered every year. It is in the coffee we buy, where the more expensive brands brag about not exploiting their workers through purchased labels for competitive advantage (would you publicly brag about not beating up your partner? that’d be weird). It is in the fact that it is impossible to go outside without being bombarded with ads, placated across cities, buses, billboards, TV, apps, websites, and potentially soon, the night sky. It is in our belief in the stock market as a legitimate institution, as it gambles away pensions and savings, crashing the global economy every decade or two while claiming it is part of the ‘natural cycle’ of our economy. It is in the fact that we value money and material possessions above all else, and center all of our lives and actions towards accumulating more of it. And above all, it is us being absolutely fine with all of it, as if there is nothing wrong with it. Or maybe rather, that nothing can be done about it. The former relates more to Marx’s definition of ideology and false consciousness being “they don’t know that they are doing it” (i.e. ideology as ignorance), while the latter is closer to Zizek’s definition of ideology of “they know that they are doing it, but are doing it still” (ideology as submission).
We need to remember that the state of society today is not how it has always been, because this fact reminds us that it doesn’t need to be like this forever. Consumerism is a relatively new concept, one that had to be hammered into our heads during the 20th century until it became second nature, only for the purpose of advancing economic growth. Before that, frugality was the name of the game, like any sound economy should be about — saving up, not unlimitedly spending and treating our planet like a bottomless resource inventory. Fossil fuels were not always an integral part of our lives, neither was pollution and environmental degradation. These too were implemented on our quest for exponential economic growth. Working ourselves to death in menial jobs, industry outsourcing, slavery, racism, gun violence, drug and substance abuse, mental illnesses and imperialism too are not inherent to our nature — they are extensions of our economic paradigm that values cheap (or free) labor & resources above all else.
There is another quote often associated with both Zizek and Frederic Jameson that says “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” — and ask yourself: why is that? Why is it that facing our own extinction can be talked about in the same 10min news segment alongside other everyday mundane events, but envisaging an alternative to our current system is rejected as idealistic lunacy? People defending the status quo often like to refer to concepts of human nature as to why we cannot possibly ask for anything else than what we have now. “Humans are inherently competitive and greedy” or “Karl Marx didn’t understand human nature” are comfortable staples of our political discourse.
We have essentially managed to link capitalism to human nature, and since we can’t do anything about our human nature, then we can’t avoid the cataclysm that capitalism is bringing to our door. This is, in my opinion, the greatest example of the ideological achievement of capitalist ideology (or any ideology ever for that matter), as it will equate its own arbitrary laws to the unchangeable, unquestionable laws of nature. Ever since the industrial revolution, science has been the one aspect of our lives which we hold to be an absolute truth (or an earnest, unbiased quest for it). We like to believe that our society is structured around the universality of the scientific method, and that our leaders are technocrats that can apply this ‘objective knowledge’ to our system of governance in order to make it ‘non-ideological’. And having associated capitalism with our human nature, that makes it the obvious, ‘scientific’ economic model to end all models.
Yet nothing could be further from the truth. For over 90% of our existence, us humans lived in tribal hunter-gatherer societies where competition was virtually non-existent, and cooperation and sharing were crucial for survival (the book Civilized to Death by Christopher Ryan is a great deeper look into this very topic). Capitalism as an ideology only goes back a few centuries, but communal living goes back tens of thousands of years. Markets as a form of model of production and distribution only goes back to the Neolithic revolution and the invention of agriculture. Resource surplus and scarcity have been the main drivers behind the creation of governments, police forces and the church as a tool of social control — and by extent, resource abundance is the direct enemy of the market system, and hence all systems that govern through implicit or explicit violence. Our human nature is not fixed, but rather it is shaped by our social, economic and environmental conditions. Hence human nature understood as being inherently selfish and competitive is only true if it is forced to exist in a system that requires selfish and competitive behavior for survival as capitalism does — or any other system in which it is believed that “there isn’t enough to go around”, despite the fact that we hold today the technological means and resources to feed and house every human being on the planet (the economic incentive just isn’t there).
Our society today is but an extension of those economic conditions, and to take a historical materialist perspective, a change in our mode of production is what will lead to true social change as well. But as I’ve pointed out in an earlier essay, it truly starts with seeing the water in which we swim, realizing that we are in fact not free, but simply conditioned beings within a self-serving bourgeois society that will do everything it can to remain in power. Their best tool? Ideology. And which is the best way to enforce an ideology on a population? Make them believe it doesn’t exist. And here we are today.