Ideology

Self-test

 * Identify your ideology by answering the following question (from Wikipedia Weltanschauung)
 * An explanation of the world
 * A futurology, answering the question "Where are we heading?"
 * Values, answers to ethical questions: "What should we do?"
 * A praxeology, or methodology, or theory of action: "How should we attain our goals?"
 * An epistemology, or theory of knowledge: "What is true and false?"
 * An etiology. A constructed world-view should contain an account of its own "building blocks", its origins and construction.

What is ideology

 * "By ideology I do not mean a knowingly biased or inaccurate description of the way society works, or an attempt to bamboozle the populace with explanations that economists know in their heart of hearts to be false. I mean, rather, an earnest and sincere effort to explain society as its ideologists themselves perceive it: an effort to speak the truth at all costs. What is “ideological” about such an effort is not its hypocrisy but its absence of historical perspective, its failure to perceive that its pronouncements are a belief system, conditioned like all belief systems by the political and social premises of the social order." (Robert L. Heilbroner, 1988: 40-41)
 * Implicit beliefs, unidentified axioms: (an anecdote to illustrate) Niels Bohr had an old shoe hanging above his door, friend comes along and asks him whether he believes in this, Bohr says 'of course not, I'm a scientist', 'but why do you have it then?', 'I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it'
 * Define an ideology as a set of general beliefs or abstract values by which people define the social and political arrangements that they believe ought to be preferred.
 * Primarily concerned with two issues: (1) specifying the legitimate grounds for distributing material, symbolic, and social resources, and (2) defining the nature and scope of moral authority
 * A (political) ideology is a set of beliefs and values that rationalizes a society's structure of power and privilege. Most simply, it is both an explanation of how and why a society's major institutions work as they do, as well as a justificatin for the outcomes produced by those institutions
 * Coercive techniques are most common in societies in which the dominant system is not accepted by a significant part of the populace
 * Propaganda, in contrast, is not believed in - at least at first by those spreading it

How ideologies work
spectrum of the population to win elections. What Gramsci calls ‘common sense’ (defined as ‘the sense held in common’) typically grounds consent. Common sense is constructed out of longstanding practices of cultural socialization often rooted deep in regional or national traditions. We must look beyond the infinitely varied ideological and cultural mechanisms to the qualities of everyday experience in order to better identify the material grounding for the construction of consent.
 * For any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual apparatus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit.
 * For a shift of ideology to occur requires the prior construction of political consent across a sufficiently large
 * Political questions become ‘insoluble’ when ‘disguised as cultural ones
 * Cultural and traditional values (such as belief in God and country or views on the position of women in society) and fears (of communists, immigrants, strangers, or ‘others’) can be mobilized to mask other realities.
 * Propaganda is all the more credible for not seeming to be propaganda at all. It has to seem to come from some unimpeachably neutral source or from the people themselves, because propaganda is about deceptive ways of getting around people's defense, of getting around their natural resistance to being told what to do by powerful forces
 * They efface their own historicity
 * Every orthodoxy requires a mechanism to neutralize heretics/dissidents (at least, once they've reached a critical threshold) in order to survive. Most simply punish heretics, ban them from influential positions. How are heretics neutralized in liberalism, where there exists supposedly no true heretic?
 * To make ideology (or a totalitarian system) function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the ends selected by those in control; rather, it is essential that the people should come to regard these ends as their own
 * They create a structure of feeling (e.g. that there is no alternative)
 * In protecting their privileges, dominant groups try to engender loyalty and respect in subordinates, not fear. Force and the threat of force, therefore, are to be avoided as much as possible. People must come to see the exercise of power by the few as natural and socially beneficial. Only then does power become authority, that is, legitimate power
 * The communication of ideology is achieved through a process of socialization. People must come to believe that the system is fair and deserving of their allegiance
 * Dominant groups therefore work to engage subordinates in a common view of the world that rationalizes the current order (God intended me to be serf)
 * Sets of beliefs or theories that are ideological purport to tell us how things are or were, and how they come or came to be so
 * Dominant ideologies function to comfort those whom the system rewards and to justify the system to those who fail
 * Marx: the ruling class not only controls the means of economic production but also the means of mental production - government, religion, family, and so on - name the predominance of ruling class ideas 'ideological hegemony'
 * The consent of the great masses is historically caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production
 * Parson: ideology is functionalist, it is simply the prevailing system because people share the basic values on which the system rests (sharing values creates order and stability) → functionalists maintain that people recognize the need for a common set of values, whereas conflict theorists hold that those values are created and imposed
 * Attitudes that are rooted in moral convictions tend to promote greater political involvement, lead to greater intolerance of (and social distancing from) those who disagree, are more likely to override concerns about procedural justice, promote greater resistance to counterattitudinal decisions by authorities, are more resistant to counter-attitudinal norms and conformity pressures, and are more opposed to value tradeoffs compared to equally strong but non-moral attitudes
 * Intuitive appeal or "the apparent corroboration of the law by individual experience": "The application to the economy as a whole of the experience of housekeeping where clearly less consumption means higher saving. But whereas the income of the individual is given, national income is determined in a capitalist system by consumption and investment decisions, a fall in one of these components by no means leading automatically to a rise in the other. Thus, individual experience does not correspond to the general economic process"

Ideology & inequality

 * Where no acceptance is demanded, no justification is needed
 * The very idea of equality is a relatively new and unusual notion
 * Whereas political revolutions, in which one ruling group replaces another, have been numerous, social revolutions, in which the entire stratification system is radically reconfigured, have been rare
 * Legitimacy: the willing acceptance of the prevailing institutional system and its attendant social inequality by most members of the society
 * Legitimation: the process by which this is brought about
 * Inequality of power and wealth distribution was justified: in the Middle Ages the divine right of kings as based in being chosen by God; the colonialists claiming their right to rule indigenous people on the basis of biological and moral superiority; the modern-day elite justifying by claiming the possession of skill or expertise in a particular field