The Curious Death of Ideology

We are living in the post ideological age, the era when the voodoo known as ideology seems to have lost whatever hold it had on the human mind.

Now to be clear ideology never meant anything to the average person the worker, the soldier, the businessman, the office clerk, the waiter or the mother trying to raise her children. Sure these people mouthed the ideological platitudes because they knew it was the way to a job or a promotion or at least an excuse to keep the secret police away. For the vast majority of the human race ideology was a nuisance at best and a bad joke at worst.

Ideology was the dogma of the intellectuals that class of educated, literate people who burst upon the scene sometime in the mid 19^th century and dominated intellectual life such as it was for about a century. Ideology began in Europe in the mid 19^th Century just as the first classes of professional intellectuals appeared. It emerged as the dogma of the lower middle classes, the clerks, the school teachers, and the bean counters; the people who wore ties and read books and wanted to feel superior to their neighbors who worked with their hands and drank beer.

The revolutions that brought the lower middle classes to power in countries like Russia, Germany (the German Revolution occurred in 1933 it isn’t recognized by Leftists because the German Revolutionary leader Hitler refused to read Marx), China and Cuba were very much revolutions of ideology. These revolutions were attempts to transform reality by forcing it to comply with ideological formulas contained in books. They failed miserably because the ideologies had no basis in reality they were the fantasies of clerks. A similar process occurred in the United States, Britain, France, Sweden and other democratic nations when the lower middle classes won election they attempted to transform society to comply with ideology.

The ideologues failed and failed miserably their utopias were revealed as shallow lies or excuses for gangsters and thugs to murder and pillage. Their dream of equality brought dictatorships and opened the way for more worldly classes to triumph. The welfare states were soon revealed as dreary places where the middle class was taxed to pay for social workers who made poor people’s lives more miserable.

Ideology reached its ascendancy in the 20^th Century when systems of ideas were seen as magical things. The right system of ideas was regarded as a solution for all the world’s problems while the wrong system of ideas was seen as evil incarnate. Like the Christians of the 16^th Century the idea worshippers quickly resorted to witch hunting, in Stalin’s Russia Trotskyites and Kulaks were purged, in McCarthy’s America people who associated with Communists were driven from the public square, in Mao’s China those who owned bird cages were beaten to death and in Latin America of the Dirty War college students were murdered for reading Che Guevara’s diary.

The triumph of ideology was followed by its rapid collapse the magic was shown as a scam and the people rejected the charlatans who promoted it. In China, the Communist Party embraced capitalism and the New Economic Policy within ten years of the end of the Cultural Revolution. In Latin America the ideological upheavals of the 1970s were followed by privatization and pragmatic economics. In Europe socialist parties embraced privatization.

Ideology has died and we now live in the post ideological world. The post ideological world is one of self interest. In the post ideological world classes and organizations protect their own interests and work to increase their own power and ignore all else. A typical example of this behavior is the Chinese Communist Party which now exists to enrich its members even if some its policies make China weaker and average Chinese poorer. Another example is the American banking system which like the Chinese Communist Party exists to enrich its leaders. Instead of sound economic policies the US banking system pursues policies that ensure maximum salaries for its executives then sticks the taxpayers with the bill.

The post ideological world is one where survival and self interest is all and ideas no longer matter. The people of ideas either become shrill cheerleaders for the system or retreat into fantasy worlds. A good example of such alternate reality theme parks can be found on the campuses of many American universities. There well paid leftist professors keep the faith of Marxism and the fantasy of revolution alive while living a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle. Other bastions of such fantasy thinking are conservative think tanks, the newsroom at The New York Times, the Cuban Presidential Palace and Bin Laden’s cave. In all those places irrelevant people whose bankrupt ideologies have proven dismal failures gather and pretend that they and their ideas still matter when they don’t.

What will replace ideology in the human mind is hard to say? My guess is that it will be technology which actually has the ability to reshape elements of reality. How the technological world will work I don’t know but I have a feeling it’ll look nothing like the ideological world.