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.
Marvellous article. A shame that the word ideology has such a pejorative connotation, though I think you're right about why this has become so. The ideas we think with are very much a strait jacket. And yet they act as a kind of social cement as well: Protestantism, for example, had a powerfully cohesive effect, and so do many other cultural formations. Unfortunately any set of ideas that help to define an "us" inevitably leave out "others". There's very little doubt in my mind that the pronoun zealots use these systems of exclusion in a weaponised way.
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.
Marvellous article. A shame that the word ideology has such a pejorative connotation, though I think you're right about why this has become so. The ideas we think with are very much a strait jacket. And yet they act as a kind of social cement as well: Protestantism, for example, had a powerfully cohesive effect, and so do many other cultural formations. Unfortunately any set of ideas that help to define an "us" inevitably leave out "others". There's very little doubt in my mind that the pronoun zealots use these systems of exclusion in a weaponised way.