Ideology: Humanity’s Weakest Link To study a domain of knowledge one can take several ‘points of view’. One can concentrate on the narrow perspectives or one can take on the ‘standpoint of the whole’. Every citizen of every society has a point of view about almost everything. Opinions are quickly stated on most anything that is within the domain of discussion of a society at a specific time. And that opinion, no matter how bereft of careful consideration, often carries great emotional momentum. Society is less a collection of individuals and more a system of points of view. A society is a matrix of positions. To be a member of society is to be part of a pre-structured social space. An individual has multiple roles; within each role is an established point of view. On occasion this is a considered point of view; more often than not it is an unconscious legacy of past experience. Each of us harbors a hierarchy of views and I think that in every society there is a dominant position or point of view or ideology. The American dominant ideology is structured about the dominant value system, which is to maximize production and consumption. The dominant ideology, like all ideologies or points of view, is narrow and dominated by the self interest of the commanding group who establish the view and maintain its superior position within the society. Being a partial point of view the dominant ideology is biased, distorted and unaware of its own assumptions. The partial point of view often claims universality and absolute validity. In some cases the claims are based on ignorance and in many cases it is based on self-interest. An individual may be a Catholic, Republican, American, Capitalist, plus many other ideologies, and when one ideology conflicts with another, the emotionally stronger trumps the weaker. Likewise one ideology will trump all the rest. Who controls the dominant ideology in your nation? I am convinced that in the USA the corporate and institutional management control the dominant ideology and the dominant ideology is capitalism, i.e. the acquisition of wealth through the maximization of production and consumption.
"The most likely site for error is in the most fundamental of our beliefs." -- Samuel W. Carey, geologist, 1988
How will one ideology trump all the rest? Is there any evidence to demonstrate how this happens? Are you talking about in society as a whole or within an individual?
Often one ideology conflicts with another. A Catholic may be contrary to his or her religious dogma by being pro-choice. One ideology must give way while the other dominates. We are meaning creating creatures. We seek meaning in order to provide purpose to our life. The meanings that we create are primarily abstract ideas about which we constantly and emotionally rally. We are taught, both by our educational institutions and through social osmosis, that we are creatures who can find truth by a dispassionate search of reality for that truth. We learn that we have the ability through “a dispassionate mind that makes decisions by weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions” to reach conclusions about truth. “This bears no relation to how the mind and brain works.” A study of cognitive science, psychology, and other domains of knowledge convince me that we have a partisan brain. That is too say that we generally exhibit a blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance to a set of abstract ideas when that set of ideas is also held by other members of the society. We tend to be unduly influenced by group think. We are unduly influenced by a group psychology. Drew Westen, in his book “The Political Brain”, speaks of the study of the brains of “fifteen committed Democrats and fifteen confirmed Republicans”. The brains of these partisans were scanned for activity while they read a series of slides. “Our goal was to present them with reasoning tasks that would lead a “dispassionate” observer to an obvious logical conclusion, but would be in direct conflict with the conclusion a partisan Democrat or Republican would want to reach about his party’s candidate.” The results of this testing showed that “when partisans face threatening information, not only are they likely to “reason” to emotionally biased conclusions, but we can trace their neural footprints as they do it…When confronted with potentially troubling political information, a network of neurons becomes active that produces distress…The brain registers the conflict between data and desire and begins the search for ways to turn off the spigot of unpleasant emotion.” There was further interesting results from the test. The brain not only shut down distress but very quickly “the neural circuits charged with regulation of emotional state seemed to recruit beliefs that eliminated the distress and conflict partisans had experienced when confronted unpleasant realities. And this all seemed to happen with little involvement of the neural circuits normally involved in reasoning.” “The partisan brain did not seem satisfied with just feeling better. It worked overtime to feel good, activating circuits that give partisans a jolt of positive reinforcement for their biased reasoning.”
I agree with you except for some of the propositions that I quoted. A Cathoic doesn't necessarily have to go against their beliefs to be pro-choice. They just need to accept a different definition of life than "life begins at conception"; therefore, their policy toward abortion my change, but their ideology wont. One can't determine how an individual will act based on their ideology because the plurality of influences or the ideology may always be modified by the individual. Subjectively, you are correct that one ideology or one value system will dominate another; however, objectively, knowing this doesn't necessarily help a person know how another person is going to act. This is because values are both self created as well as imposed by society. Next, I think that we seek purpose (purposeful activity) in order to provide meaning. As much as we would like to create meaning to have purpose in our lives, the meanings are largely created for us. Only a schizoid or some other type of extreme personality could effectively create their own meaning without first pursuing purposeful activity, and people who do this usually end up living alone doing nothing and causing great distress to others around them. You are right to some extent, but I don't know how much because it varies from individual to individual. However, I am willing to be that the majority of society lacks such strong or independent personalities that would allow them to live meaningful lives without conforming to some extent.
Eidolan The great truth of human nature is that wo/man strives for meaning. S/he imposes on raw experience symbolic categories of thought, and does so with conceptual structures of thought. “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul.”—Otto Rank In the nineteenth century, after two hundred years of opposition paradigms, science faced the dilemma: if we make wo/man to be totally an object of science, to be as this object merely a conglomeration of atoms and wheels then where is there a place for freedom? How can such a collection of mere atoms be happy, and fashion the Good Life? The best thinkers of the Enlightenment followed by the best of the nineteenth century were caught in the dilemma of a materialistic psychology. Does not the inner wo/man disappear when humans are made into an object of science? On the other hand if we succumb to the mode of the middle Ages, when the Church kept man firmly under the wraps of medieval superstitions, do we not give up all hope for self-determined man? “Yet, we want man to be the embodiment of free, undetermined subjectivity, because this is the only thing that keeps him interesting in all of nature…It sums up the whole tragedy of the Enlightenment vision of science.” There are still those who would willingly surrender wo/man to Science because of their fear of an ever encroaching superstitious enemy. Kant broke open this frustrating dilemma. By showing that sapiens could not know nature in its stark reality, that sapiens had no intellectual access to the thing-in-itself, that humans could never know a nature that transcended their epistemology, Kant “defeated materialistic psychology, even while keeping its gains. He centered nature on man, and so made psychology subjective; but he also showed the limitations of human perceptions in nature, and so he could be objective about them, and about man himself. In a word man was at once, limited creature, and bottomless mystery, object and subject…Thus it kept the best of materialism, and guaranteed more than materialism ever could: the protection of man’s freedom, and the preservation of his inner mystery.” After Kant, Schilling illuminated the uniqueness of man’s ideas, and the limitations from any ideal within nature. Schilling gave us modern wo/man. Materialism and idealism was conjoined. Wo/man functioned under the aegis of whole ideas, just as the idealists wanted, and thus man became an object of science while maintaining freedom of self-determination. The great truth of the nineteenth century was that produced by William Dilthey, which was what wo/man constantly strived for. “It was “meaning” said Dilthey, meaning is the great truth about human nature. Everything that lives, lives by drawing together strands of experience as a basis for its action; to live is to act, to move forward into the world of experience…Meaning is the relationship between parts of experience.” Man does not do this drawing together on the basis of simple experience but on the basis of concepts. Man imposes symbolic categories of thought on raw experience. His conception of life determines the manner in which s/he values all of its parts. Concludes Dilthey, meaning “is the comprehensive category through which life becomes comprehensible…Man is the meaning-creating animal.” Quotes and ideas from “Beyond Alienation” Becker
