ideologies

Ideologies #

‘Ideology’ comes from the French idéologie, and was first used during the French Revolution, but didn’t become popularised until the publication of Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The German Ideology (written in 1846) and later Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1929).

People may form “ideological predispositions”. All strongly held ideologies were effectively faith-based, as no human being could survive long without some ultimate loyalty. If that loyalty didn’t derive from traditional religion, it would find expression through secular commitments, such as nationalism, socialism, or liberalism …. Mindsets, dogmas, doctrines ..

“enduring a belief whose logic brought them somewhere else to grief”. Auden

Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes (judgement)? Groucho Marx

Inquiry – Alice:

The more questions you ask, the more you will learn.

Edgar Allen Poe: Believe half of what you see, and nothing of what you hear.

F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Our parent’s children, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“ toxic group think.” Curtis came to perceive a mindset among ruling élites of all stripes—among the American political establishment, in Russia and China, at think tanks and the European Union, international banks and tech companies—that was an attempt to manage the world without transforming it. After the violence and social experiments of the twentieth century, it made sense to give up on grand ideologies, but the result is that we live in societies without narrative coherence, with old myths boiling up. ……..

Conservatism #

Liberalism #

Liberalism in the modern era has thus become a kind of strange pantomime act in which elite politicians deploy the rhetoric of imminent threats and national emergency only to behave like hapless passengers trapped aboard a sinking ship. Although it has certainly found its most potent expression in Washington, this posture of feigned powerlessness has gradually come to infect the broder culture and ideology of worldwide liberalism as a whole.

Dickens’s satire is liberalism. We associate liberalism with caring about the poor and the working class, which Dickens obviously did. But in nineteenth-century England the typical liberal was a utilitarian, who believed that the worth of a social program could be measured by cost-benefit analysis, and very likely a Malthusian, who thought it necessary to lower the birth rate so that the population would not outstrip the food supply.

Australian liberalism

Yet as the beleaguered party considers its options, entreaties to double-down on the very things that alienated it from its base are already being aired. The logic can be well hidden. “The Liberal Party’s experiment with the poison of leftism and progressivism must be over.” Other prominent conservatives on the network suggested Liberals who had become pale imitations of Labor were the ones defeated, whereas hardliners who stood up against climate policy and who oppose a First Nations Voice to Parliament, had been successful. These were their takes after the most significant shift to the left by mainstream voters in memory.

They highlight the influence of ideology and what looms as a wrestle for the centre-right soul that lay ahead.