Ideology

Ideology is a collection of ideas, norms, beliefs, and values intentionally designed by Agents of Consciousness to shape human behaviour and cognition in ways not conducive to health and full connection, but instead conducive to the economic, political, and social interests of the Accumulating Class. Ideology maintains the status quo by masking the exploitative nature of the Regime of Accumulation and the social class relations inherent. Ideology is a key element of the Indoctrination that occurs as a consequence of this planet's colonially derived Toxic Socialization process. Ideology is a sub-category of Wrong Thought.

Syncretic Terms

Ideology > Master Narrative

Elements of Toxic Socialization

Toxic Socialization > Chaos, Destruction of Attachments, Indoctrination, Neglect, Parentification, Violence

Elements of Indoctrination

Indoctrination > Creation Template, Ideological Institution, Sacrilization, Symbol Factory

Related LP Terms

Ideology > Archetypes, Conceptual Framework, EPMO, Fish Slap, Flow Purification, Hidden Framework, Ideological Bleed, Less Than Messages, Regime of Accumulation, Symbol, System Agent, System Maintenance, Triumph of Spirit Archetype Deck, Wrong Thought

Non-LP Related Terms

Ideology > Big Questions, Ideological State Apparatus, Ideology, Indoctrination, Louis Althusser, Master Narrative, Ruling Ideology, Subjugated Knowledge

Notes

"ideology... is endowed with a structure and functioning such as to make it a nonhistorical -"

"Ideology represents individuals' imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence."

Ideology is inserted into your brain by Agents of Consciousness in a process of repetition and reinforcement known as indoctrination. Ideology and indoctrination are components of Toxic Socialization. Ideology makes it harder to Heal and Connect.

Ideology is often obscured with EPMO

An ideology is a set of beliefs and doctrines that an individual or group hold for "other than purely epistemic reasons." Ideologies form the basis of a political, economic, or social systems.

Ideologies operate by providing excuses and justification that a) quell the doubt and assuage the guilt of the abusers/exploiters and b) encourage docility, compliance, and silent acceptance by the victims/exploited.

There are four broad categories of ideology in use on this planet. These are:

* Gender Ideology - Ideology that provides justification for gender-based exploitation of women
* Race Ideology - Ideology that provides justification for racially-based exploitation of humans.
* Social Class Ideology - Ideology that provides justification for socially based exploitation.
* Spiritual Ideology - Ideology that provides justification for spiritual exploitation.

Ideologies typically have both a "scientific" expression and a "religious" expression. The religious expression of gender ideology is present in stories and monologues that suggest, for example, that women are weak temptresses. The scientific expression of gender ideology is expressed in notions of genetically/naturally based differences, with men being considered stronger/more evolved, and women being seeing as weaker/less advanced.

Althuser

Ideology is " the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group."

Loius Althuser notes that ideology facilitates the reproduction of the labour force. See Mechanisms of Reproduction

According to Althusser, in Marxian theory no general theory of ideology is possible, because all ideologies are located within specific regimes are are thus determined by them "It will then be clear that a theory of ideologies depends in the last resort on the history of social formations, and thus of the modes of production combined in social formations, and of the class struggles which develop in them. In this sense it is clear that there can be no question of a theory of ideologies in general, since ideologies (defined in the double respect suggested above: regional and class) have a history, whose determination in the last instance is clearly situated outside ideologies alone, although it involves them."

In the German Ideology, marx suggests that ideology has no history, and that it is a dream (unreal), though there may be history in it. Althusser disagrees, ideologies have a history of their own, determined by class struggle. This seems to be empirically true.

Althuser disagrees and suggests you can provide a general theory.

"I think it is possible to hold that ideologies have a history of their own (although it is determined in the last instance by the class struggle); and on the other, I think it is possible to hold that ideology in general has no history , not in a negative sense (its history is external to it), but in an absolutely positive sense. This sense is a positive one if it is true that the peculiarity of ideology is that it is endowed with a structure and a functioning such as to make it a non-historical reality, i.e. an omni-historical reality, in the sense in which that structure and functioning are immutable, present in the same form throughout what we can call history, in the sense in which the Communist Manifesto defines history as the history of class struggles, i.e. the history of class societies."

why ideology? According to Althusser, two general reasons have been proposed

1) elites create it

2) it arises from humanity's general alienation.

For Althusser

Thesis I. Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.... "It is this relation that contains the ‘cause’ which has to explain the imaginary distortion of the ideological representation of the real world....What is represented in ideology is therefore not thesystem of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live."

Thesis II: Ideology has a material existence.

For Althusser, ideology is powerful because people think and act according to what they believe.

"Throughout this schema we observe that the ideological representation of ideology is itself forced to recognize that every ‘subject’ endowed with a ‘consciousness’ and believing in the ‘ideas’ that his ‘consciousness’ inspires in him and freely accepts, must ‘act according to his ideas’, must therefore inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in the actions of his material practice. If he does not do so, ‘that is wicked’. Indeed, if he does not do what he ought to do as a function of what he believes, it is because he does something else, which, still as a function of the same idealist scheme, implies that he has other ideas in his head as well as those he proclaims, and that he acts according to these other ideas, as a man who is either ‘inconsistent’ (‘no one is willingly evil’) or cynical, or perverse."

==Footnotes==

References

[[Is a related term::Ruling Ideology||