The Ideology of Magic Words
If it seems like left-wingers are primitive, it's because they are
The modern West has come under the sway of a credulous, intellectually-underdeveloped superstition that threatens its continued development and prosperity. This is, of course, woke progressivism. And like most primitive belief systems, progressivism has faith in the power and ability of magic words and fetishes to change or control reality. By fixating upon certain symbols which represent their ideological framework, the modern Left hopes to invest these symbols with the power to alter even the sensible world itself.
Ancient man’s discovery of writing provided to him the ability to represent his thoughts symbolically and in a way that preserves and transmits them to his posterity. In essence, writing allowed humanity to transcend its own impermanence. However, for many, the fetishistic understanding of symbolism merely carried itself into writing, such that the seemingly supernatural powers of the totem was transferred into written words, which have the ability to actually shape and direct unseen energies that warp the world around them. Yet, this conceit was not confined to ancient man. Even today, we have many superstitious types who imagine that their manipulation of the symbols of communication allow them to render reality malleable.
Previously, I’ve discussed the difference between “worldview” and “ideology” in relation to their appearance in western civilisation. Worldview is traditional and organic and arises from within a well-rounded understanding of the world and the way it works, based on realism and the accumulated observations of generations. Ideology, on the other hand, is mechanical and artificial, depending on the use of intellectual force to make propositions mesh with each other, even when they don’t do so naturally, so that these artificial creations can then be transmitted to adherents. Worldview is a comprehensive way of thinking about the world; ideology ends up being a comprehensive way of not thinking about the world. Indeed, the very term “ideology” presupposes that which is conceived via pure ideation, mentally constructed in a way that is divorced from realistic experience or observation.
So it’s not really surprising that the term “ideology” was not widely used until socialist and communist writers began to employ it starting in the middle of the 19th century. The culmination of “Enlightenment” philosophies that rejected traditional forms naturally led to “ideology” completely segregated from reality.
This is why modern journalism, reporting, and official narrative wordsmithing are so susceptible to being hijacked by the Left. Their power rests in the presentation and manipulation of this symbolic magic, crafting an officially accepted “reality” that is then conferred upon the masses who depend upon the ideological priestly caste to give them direction. This approach to truth is not really compatible with traditional, and which we would tend to refer to as “right wing,” methods which are more grounded in concrete, physical realities. Those who reject this magical view of words do not believe that realities as they actually exist can be changed by journalistic incantation and fetishism. This helps to explain the appeal - and the hatred for - Project Veritas, which uses its knowledge of journalistic ritual to reveal the esoteric secrets of the Left, what is “going on behind the scenes” about which the masses are not supposed to know.
This approach to “truth” was supposed to direct the behaviour of the now-defunct (for the time being) “Disinformation Governance Board” that was being set up by the Department of Homeland Security to protect official narrative from ideological competition. Indeed, the whole concept of “disinformation” as it is used by government and social media today reflects the attempt to ideologically define as “true” official narrative propositions, regardless of their correlation to objective reality. As such, these are merely further efforts to use the magical powers of ideological symbols to turn falsehood into axiomatic truths. “Disinformation expert” Nina Jankowicz was just robbed of her opportunity to be the chief witch doctor for Blue Tribe.
Because the Left never lets a crisis go to waste (indeed, that’s an integral part of narrative evolution), we’re currently seeing the incantational mechanism in action with regards to the recent mass shooting in Buffalo and the efforts to demonise the “great replacement theory.” Now, “GRT” is easy to demonise because it’s a specific term that most normies have not heard of before and therefore don’t already have preconceived notions about it. Hence, it can be associated with existential ideological enemies (and hey, who wants to be associated with horrible white supremacist mass killers, right?) and invested with whatever content The Powers That Be want. Yet, the fundamental premises of GRT are things that basically everybody knows to be true, one some level or another. However, these must be masked and hidden from sight lest their magical power of demographic transmogrification be interrupted and the spellcasting ritual be broken.
It’s not like the great replacement is some kind of off-the-wall conspiracy theory, though. Objectively, the decline in the white percentage of population in countries all across the West - decline driven by very specific and targeted demographic policies - are both intuitively obvious and easily demonstrable from simple statistics. Indeed, the left-wing media have been talking about (and hoping for) this decline all the way back to 2000. It’s not like the far Left has been particularly shy about telling whites that having white babies is “white supremacy,” condemning white women who side with their husbands over and against far Left racemongers, or bragging about how whites will soon become minorities in their own countries. I can’t imagine where anybody would get the idea that there was some weirdly hostile anti-white movement in the offing or anything.
As we’re all aware, the great replacement theory is being connected with the Buffalo shooter and is being used to drive the meme of “far right white domestic terrorist violence.” This is being done via a combination of media word-magic and federal agency psyoping (as with most high-profile extremism cases, such as the recent “plot to kidnap Michigan governour Whitmer,” this shooting most likely has operator fingerprints all over it). Frankly, if you want to end domestic terrorism you’d be better off disbanding the FBI.
With progressivism, it always comes back to this primitive, non-rational way of viewing the world - even for the “rationalistic” types who “believe in science.” For them, “science” is merely another form of sympathetic magic that can transmute reality into what they want it to be. It becomes just another means of advancing official ideology, regardless of real world consequences.
Historically, this was demonstrated most amply by the decades-long hold of Lysenkoism over Soviet biology and agriculture. Today, the theories and practices of Trofim Lysenko are rightly viewed as complete pseudoscience. However, from the 1920s to the 1960s, Lysenko’s theories received official enforcement by the Soviet authorities, to the point that other Soviet geneticists and biologists who held to “bourgeois” science (i.e. real biology) were imprisoned and even executed at various times. Lysenkoism was official Soviet ideology and was pushed by all relevant propaganda and media outlets in that country. While promising vast improvements in Soviet crop yields, Lysenko’s methodologies actually reduced Soviet agricultural output and increased Soviet reliance on foreign food sources. However hard the Soviets tried to wishcast Lysenkoist biology into fruition, reality nevertheless continued to assert itself.
Really, we see the exact same kind of thing happening today. This is, essentially, what drives the transgender movement - the belief that literal physical and biological realities can be altered merely by wanting it to be so. After all, once the concept of reality itself becomes fungible, everything else can follow. But hey, transgenderism must be science, since some supporters of transgenderism with academic degrees wrote some journal articles! Of course, Trofim Lysenko also wrote journal articles as well. And in the exact same way as with the Soviet experience, reality reasserts itself, leaving only broken lives and mutilated bodies in the wake of this pseudoscientific experimentation.
Still, in a number of areas of so-called science, formally progressive state ideological requirements continue to be ideologically imposed and rigourously enforced. This is why a Wisconsin middle schooler is getting Title IXed for not using some mentally ill weirdo’s “preferred pronouns.” Everything from global warming to covid responses is approached not from actual known science, but from ideological diktat. In each one of these areas, the shamans of progressive semiotics are attempting to craft their own sacred magical realm by silencing dissent among the profane masses.
Ultimately, if not restrained the Left is going to keep moving leftward under the impetus of their essentially pseudoreligious fanaticism. Because these people are not reality-based, they don’t understand restraining effects or the wisdom of moderation. Instead, their response to the rejection of their fanaticism is and will continue to be more and deeper fanaticism as their holiness spiral continues out of control. One can hope that reason returns at some point and reins them in, but I fear that this will only take place forcefully once the Right is in a formal position to do so using legitimate power. Until then, we’re going to have a bunch of dangerous religious fanatics on our hands that we need to figure out how to contain.
An excellent point that ideology presupposes an origin in pure ideation, theory divorced from any contact with reality, which as its first and most essential demand requires that disconfirming evidence be suppressed, ignored, or tortured into compliance with the ideology. Virtualization of human experience likely bears some of the blame for the accentuation of this tendency in recent history. The laptop class has very little contact with reality - they're easy prey for ideological hijacking.
Rather than oppose ideology with ideology, we perhaps need a new concept to set up to contrast our program with that of the ideologues. Perhaps pragmatology, or aletheology - the study of reality, the study of truth. This makes explicit the divide between those who base their conception of the world on ideas, and those who make the realities of the world the ordering principle of their ideas.
Lacking spiritual and cultural foundations, many people are attracted to the unreal and unfeasible utopian vision of the left because they are presented as worthy and meaningful, but at its most petty basic, because they believe that they are the cool crowd.