The Emotional Realism of Ideology, Privilege, and Identity
There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. — Matt Taibbi
I think it may not be a coincidence that the rise of printing and book publication and literacy and the phenomenon of best sellers all preceded the humanitarian reforms of the Enlightenment. — Steven Pinker
As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. … That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind. — Anthony de Mello
Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension. — Joshua L. Liebman
The acceleration of learning through information technology and the alienation of our lifeworld through capitalist consumerism has disrupted our ability to find concordance with each other, leading to confusion.
Essentially it is in our nature to find group coherency. In the past, the juxtaposition of different peoples either led to their avoidance of one another (such as keeping geographically and linguistically separate), or it led to some form of eventual assimilation. With social media, we have the opposite occurring as the internet allows non-local interactions without the shared cultural and social contexts of local interactions to promote gradual assimilation.
This is a very long article that provides an angle on the multitudinous media that assault our sense of stability each time we engage with the informational commons.
- Section 1 introduces the overall frame for learning.
- Section 2 examines how the mechanism that enables learning interacts with our technological cultural systems further learning to the point of group decoherence.
- Section 3 provides a conceptual framework for ideological formation.
- Section 4 focuses on problems and solutions of ideology.
- Section 5 concludes by restating the problem with what is at stake.
I have contemplated many ways of splitting this article but have retained its unity because it is one thought.
1. The Narratives of Information Technology
Information technology is game-changing because humans make decisions based on information.
Information requires language, as the medium for communication. Language also carries context as the limit for how the message is applied. The most common structure for context is narrative. Narrative is instructional in that it presents readymade situations and meanings.
For instance, cultures have core identities expressed in a bildungsroman. For the British, the story of King Arthur functions in this regard. Japan has Izanagi and Izanami. Narratives are so powerful that anyone can create a cultural template. Voltaire wrote Candide, a novella, to mock Leibniz and his philosophy. Shakespeare is famous for how widespread his plays like Hamlet, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet have expressed meanings.
Cultural and mythological narratives are so prevalent that Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jordan Peterson, and Joseph Campbell (among many others) built their models of human meaning-making from examinations of narratives.
Human organization of knowledge as information in narrative form has three main influences: the first pragmatic, the second social, and the third emotional.
- We benefit from information passed on from people who are absent. Narrative determines context so we can apply meaning. This can be mundane as apply stories your grandmother told you about bartering so you can do the same when you find yourself in a position to barter. Having shared stories enables people to repeat knowledge in the form of bound attitudes and behaviors. This is how narrative is foundational to culture, leading to the next consequence of narrative.
- Narrative establishes identity through the meaning of situations via the different roles of character types. For example, the sidekick can be one such identity. If someone identifies as a sidekick, they will instinctively act as a sidekick, seeing the situations they are in terms of those sidekick meanings. (Such as this man who thinks he is Batman.) When ethnicity and culture integrate, the result can be type-casting as with the Black Best Friend. The identification of character types from narrative form provides a readymade template for socialization.
- Narrative is a framework for emotional regulation as meaning determines what is (un)allowed. Being good/following the rules is comforting. People identify with the ready-made meanings from cultural narratives. Narratives guide feelings even in the face of the unknown. For instance, when scared, people may make the sign of the cross to comfort themselves. The US military trains its soldiers to live according to the narrative identity of what it means to be a soldier so that its personnel instinctively know how to act in a crisis situation.
With narrative form, knowledge carries an implicit social order that determines who does what, by guiding us on what is good, bad, allowed and valuable. These shared identities regulate behavior so that strangers can better coordinate and feel familiar with one another.
Emotional regulation is the glue that makes narrative and identity stick. People who identify with a given narrative identify with an identity in that narrative. That identification is reinforced through social interaction as behaviors are reinforced. For example, one such reward/punishment system could include boys given toys for boys and girls given toys for girls.
Emotional regulation is the basic measure by which humans learn the social order and consequently, their place in the world. This emotional regulation has a special hook: the reward system.
1.1 The Identity Hook
Essentially dopamine, at least for certain receptors in the brain plays a role in reinforcing behavior and encoding memory. This reward system is the internal engine for the human species’ success.
I am not a neurologist, but at least according to this article, dopamine performs many different functions. Regardless of the actual mechanics, which this article and others should be informed, the point is we have a reward system and here’s some speculation on how our reward/learning system today leads to confusion.
With the example of raising children, children are exposed to many narratives full of many identities. Many of these identities become significant to a child, perhaps reinforced with social rewards, so that children grow in specific ways.
There are, of course, many examples of self-involved parents who unwittingly raise their children to be mirror images of themselves or to be co-dependent on their whimsies. Our pets also take cues from us and become to conform to our image.
But regardless of how we think children should be raised, the mixture of reward and socialization provides the context for what the post-Marxist Louis Althusser calls the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). The ISA is the sum of language, culture, and ideology as a kind of social imprinting mechanism that imprints culturally specific subjectivity.
This imprinting works through the actions of other people. The video below explains the concept of social imprinting fairly well, even though the expression and the origins of the video’s concept is different from ISA. Althusser developed his ideas from Marxism, whereas Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson were Americans, one a psychologist and the other an educator. They coined what they discovered as The Pygmalion Effect.
I highlight these two concepts from very different backgrounds because both explain how socialization and identity are connected, even if they explain identity as having a different basis, one in terms of institutional systems and the other as interpersonal psychological reinforcement.
It is perhaps impossible to cite how people causally form their self-concept. But what both concepts agree on is that the narratives people express to each other and themselves focuses their emotions while marking each other (and the self) socially for the purposes of identity and belonging.
Keeping in mind the triangulation of emotion, identity, and social meaning, when we examine the current lifeworld, on the surface, it appears that the reward system central to human behavior has been hijacked. So much of daily meaning is now littered with tropes from religion, fictional narratives, and advertisement. Our behavior is also continually modified through outrage porn, clickbait, viral trends, and product placement.
All of this contemporary activity highlights how central our internal states are in influencing our behavior, our interests, and our socialization. In the next section, we dig deeper into the central mechanisms of reinforcement. Along the way, we can see how our increased ability to hook into that mechanism has eroded our traditional sense of who we are and what we are doing.
2. The Choice of Reward
The influence of our reward system is deeper than modern ideology and technology. The reward system, something unique to mammals, activates through learning. This is why mammals, different than reptiles or fish, are more curious. We are internally rewarded for our curiosity with a burst of pleasure. If we are curious about the right things then we learn something that furthers our survival.
As what we do was pushed by dopamine reinforcement, it was inevitable that we would gravitate towards developing technologies and behaviors that would increase pleasure.
For instance, as the most successful animals on the planet, we get pleasure and joy from learning and play so much that we developed language and the innate ability to ask each other questions to better learn from each other. No other primates actively try to learn from each other.
Our learning does nothing more than associate feelings, behaviors, our senses, and our ideas. This is a gross simplification, but evolution can’t pre-determine how to behave for every situation. As a result, humans have evolved into generic association machines. We can associate anything (such as feeling, behavior, or sense) with anything else. This reinforcement can also re-associate nearly anything, including built-in biological prohibitions like incest or scatology.
As a consequence of how learning can reinforce anything, not only is our language incredibly flexible but humans have also developed a wide range of activities including fetishes, enjoyments, activities, hobbies, and interests. If you can imagine it, someone has already mastered it.
As humans are encoded to release pleasure so those humans will not only refuse to give up behavior that they find pleasurable but also pass it on to others. If you love a sport, you will probably never stop playing it, going to places where other people play it, and never stop talking about it or sharing it with others.
In that sense, because humans can so radically learn via pleasure, systems geared towards pleasure, such as capitalism, or the internet, were inevitable.
Likewise, because of the social nature of humans, sharing things that bring pleasure and others (i.e. social media on the internet) was also inevitable, such as the video ads and share buttons on social media.
Systems like the above, including the Disneyland theme park, were formed because participation in such activities encourages pleasure for so many of us. Not only do we want to feel good, but we want to do it together.
In that sense, traditional cultures were not really eroded by capitalism. Those cultures first formed due to dopamine reinforcement over generations. When more direct ways to achieve pleasure became available so fewer people participated in traditional activities, which are less instant with its gratification.
While cultural systems lose adherents to newer activities, so our internal reward system remains the same.
The ever-increasing range of reinforcement/learning means that humans as a whole will always tend towards enabling further choice in various dopamine inspired activities. The simplest of such activities include the legalization of marijuana or gratuitous sex and violence, among the many activities humans like to experience.
Interestingly, games are a special case. Games contextual activities to highlight particular behaviors and values in order to force discovery and learning so that dopamine release can be more quickly achieved. This is why humans love games.
Of course, this is why we have so many choices in entertainment and activity.
I explore this idea of choice as fundamental to forming hyperreal capitalist rewards in this article Metamodern Choice.
Increased choice today has three expressions, each of which has consequences.
- Web 2.0 and the online choice of information
- consumer freedom and the choice of identity
- the choice of meaning due to the lack of shared context, or if you will, the proliferation of contexts
The following subsections explore each of these. If you don’t care about these aspects you can jump to section 3 which introduces a conceptual frame for navigating our current situation of meaning deterioration.
2.1 The Choice of Information
Essentially, since human attention is contextual, any behavior or concept can be reinforced, especially if other people also prize that behavior or concept. E.g., anything can become contextualized (gamified) and anything can become pleasurable, including the reinforcement of identity.
While Pavlov’s studies are often expressed in terms of behavior, the fact is, Pavlov’s dogs were reinforced on what we humans would express as a concept (which is also an association): that ringing a bell meant that food was to be present. This lesson could be better generalized that learning is less about external behavior than it is about the association between external and internal states. (This reinforcement is also why cats can be taught.)
In other words, learning is understanding how we can make choices due to information. For animals, learning could associate information with emotion, or behavior. For humans, information also includes language. As social creatures, we not only understand the world through words, we talk and think about the world in words. Words add a dimension of understanding between us and the world; between self and other.
Temple Grandin explains in Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, that dopamine depends on identification. Only after the subconscious has picked a context that it feels is valuable, will new information about that context trigger dopamine release. This explains why children who identify with a video game strongly can play that game for hours on end, whereas parents who don’t care about the video game will find playing it tedious.
This reinforcement of dopamine through associated significance means that it may be possible for people to become addicted to reinforcing the input of a certain kind of information (sensory, behavioral, linguistic or chemical). People can like doing anything for the sake of doing it, once they get “into it”.
For information, social media is a buffet of potential reinforced learning. In the context of narratives and identity, social media is a buffet of potential reinforced learning in the form of a decentralized 24-hour news cycle. Each story has the potential to provide a boost of dopamine. As so much information is available, an entrenched audience can find aspects of that story to reinforce their already prized ideas about what the external world needs to look like.
Learning is not a bad thing. Our triangular relationship with dopamine association between learning, socialization, and identity has perpetuated those associations to accelerate human development. This means that our collective consciousness throughout all of history has become littered with perpetuated behaviors, concepts, cultures, language, and traditions, guiding our survival and continuity.
This litter is what Richard Dawkins calls memes.
It is no accident that on the internet, memes at their most basic are short and humorous mimicries that provide pleasure for those who “get it”. Not only do internet memes create a short circuit to deliver dopamine boosts in a kind of junk information (like jokes or fiction) — but such short circuits are automatically shared as part of socialization, hooking in our sense of identity.
Since we are discussing social media, we might as well dive into the limits of the internet today.
2.1.1 Web 3.0
Much of the clumsiness of current social media is due not only to limits of bandwidth and interface but also to the ahistorical nature of Tim Berners-Lee’s design of the World Wide Web. As social media’s enabling of mimesis has sparked the greatest change in society to date, I predict that Web 3.0 will arrive when mimesis is unleashed.
This unleashing necessitates the addition of history into the structure of the internet. Currently, the main product of megacorporations like Google and FaceBook is their data, which is the historic profile of each user. Such history tracks and promotes mimesis, by focusing user attention on what the user will most likely identify with. Unleashing mimetics requires that that history be part of the anonymous internet; which means that the main product of the megacorporate platforms of FaceBook and Google becomes free for all.
There are two limits to having data-driven platforms in charge of managing history.
- Running a centralized platform with machine learning algorithms on users is expensive. The cost of maintaining mimesis in a Web 2.0 fashion requires a source of income, which online advertisement brings. The presence of such platforms also means that the development of the internet will be limited as corporations attempt to control the mimetic pools their platforms create. One example includes a policy change championed by Mark Zuckerberg to increase the regulation on user privacy (such regulation would increase the cost of being an online platform, limiting future competition).
- Monopolizing the mimetic pool comes naturally as each platform exclusively owns and operates the technology for those interactions. However, trying to maintain a monopoly means that each platform will attempt to keep users on its platform. While these megacorporations have money to develop new technologies, you can also be sure that they will be very conservative when it comes to modifying their platforms and unleashing greater (potentially uncontrolled) mimetic activity. Already internet companies face a backlash from playing an (irresponsible) part in the 2016 election leading to censorship, as megacorporations attempt to limit the social cost of their technology.
Ultimately megacorporations will attempt to limit the growth of mimesis if that growth means the megacorporation might lose their platform. On the other hand, having a platform will foster mimetic growth if it furthers the survival of the platform. In a way, social media platforms have become a kind of culture, as different cultures enable different behaviors while restricting other behaviors.
Thus, there are two tensions. Our tendency to centralize comes from economies of scale for megacorporations. However, our tendency to expand in terms of our information intake comes from deep from within life itself.
I believe that expansion is a stronger force as it has existed for millions if not billions of years.
This expansion has also been expressed in how capitalism has impacted identity. Capitalism has freed the expression of identity by disassociating roles from identity. Like information, capitalism also enables learning as new technologies and products can form new dopamine associations.
This is explained in the next section.
2.2 Consumer Choice
The 1950s was when the industrial complex built by militarization in WW2 started to support American consumerism. Eventually, that capitalism gave way to a proliferation of identity. Why did identity explode? Was it due to increased exposure to other cultures? Consumerism couldn’t be the cause, could it? After all, the 1950s still had set roles for the sexes, the races, and capitalism was already in full swing.
Today, many of the traditional roles are gone due to the range of consumer choice enabled by capitalism.
Essentially traditional roles were defamiliarized. As technology developed, consumer products became so advanced as to eventually bypass traditional procedures for creating the lifeworld, which in the USA were historically rural. For example, policies of the US Department of Agriculture led to the de-ruralization of Americans as post-WW2 policies leaned towards the stimulation of the economy through propagandized suburbanization. Essentially, the USA defarmed itself to push its GDP into full swing. America defarmed itself in order to avoid another Great Depression, to keep people working and buying within the money system.
At first many of the products capitalism promoted were marketed via identity. Women were shown as wives who needed time and energy saving technologies in the kitchen and around the house. Men could pursue a playboy lifestyle with technology. Products were tied to social roles.
Today much of the behavior has been re-coded as contextual behavior, and not part of an identity. This is because capitalism, through the incentives of private property, rewards individuals. Adults can choose to live in isolation, or in non-heteronormative, or post-cultural situations. We don’t need to work together to maintain a household. Anyone can just buy the products or hire the services needed to maintain a household.
The need for more profit would drive capitalists to discover and promote products as solutions needed by everyone. Why should cooking only be for moms? If single men cook, then more cooking products would be sold! Why should only X do Y? Why not market Y to Z and W while we are marketing to X?
Today, much of our identity is wrapped up in goals external to us. These goals come as fitness goals, health goals, relationship goals, hobby goals, and even career goals — all dictated by external standards presented in media. Our behavior, identity, and reinforcement are shaped by our informational context, which often comes from our devices and our friends (who are also influenced by their devices).
When we see caricatures in media that we identify with doing something, we are more likely to be interested in those products/activities and meaning. If that caricature reveals some truths about ourselves, in an attention-getting way, all the more successful that advertisement would be. Watch the video below for one such humorous portrayal.
We drown in products for all use and occasion.
The abundance of time-saving products means that our lifeworld no longer depends on a connection between specific behaviors for specific identities as anyone can do anything. Two consequences arise from the lack of necessity for our having roles dependent on identity. The first consequence is we lose the main impetus for forming social bonds (interdependency). The second consequence is that as identity becomes independent of behavior, so identity becomes increasingly a matter of individual choice.
The next two subsections cover these topics.
2.2.1 Loneliness and Addiction
The major consequence of the separation of identity from social role includes the destruction of traditional lifeworlds as people could buy products to fit their needs. With impersonal purchasing available, we no longer need to maintain relationships to get what we want.
The loss of traditional lifeworlds means that we no longer share a common understanding of the roles people are meant to have. To create new bonds in a less understood context means that others may not share the same context. This lack of shared context makes it harder to create new bonds.
As a result, we find it easier to be single than to be a couple. We find it easier to buy than to befriend.
This lack of socialization means less opportunity to experience the dopamine sensations of belonging. We have less incentive to work on forming bonds although we still crave dopamine. To fill the void of loneliness, we often turn to dopamine laden experiences. With consumer capitalism, that is easy to do.
Thus, loneliness correlates with an increase in addiction, be it through social media, video games, porn, drugs or any other behavior that can reinforce itself or any chemical that can bring relief from the void.
The result? We become singletons (the Japanese call these people hikikomori). Isolation doesn’t just lead to loneliness. Isolation also means a lack of identity.
In the search for uniqueness, many of us start to latch onto any product or behavior we want to identify with. This is made easier as, without roles to determine identity, adopting identities can completely become a matter of self-determination.
2.2.2 Causa Sui Identity
Capitalism helped disassociate identity from roles on both the production and the consumer side.
On the consumer market side, products could be used by anybody regardless of their identity because products can be usable and purchasable by anyone.
On the social hierarchy side, results-driven thinking led to a de-genderization and desegregation of the jobs market.
The main break here is between identity and social position. This legal event was called the civil rights movement.
The civil rights movements happened because activists wanted their group to be able to participate in the abundance of consumer culture.
Essentially, the expansion of products and jobs meant more consumers and more laborers which meant an expansion of the GDP, which is the economic reason for the passage of civil rights laws. For instance, the Americans with Disabilities Act has 4 parts: the first relates to employment; the second to citizenship and its benefits; the third to consumer activity; and the last to telecommunications. All of these are to help the vast disabled population (which could be any of us) gain access to and spend their dollars.
If identity is no longer based on cues of social positioning, or what general roles were allowed, then what should identity be based on?
Of course, humans still have identities. Jobs may become more inclusive instead of exclusive regarding identity, but names still originate from any distinction, including jobs, race, behaviors, product association, brands, media platforms, catch-phrases and so on.
Today identity has become so free that identity has become for-itself in-itself, a self-determining concept.
Many traditionalists have found this multiplicity of identity bewildering, which brings us to the last section.
2.3 Choice of Meaning
There were many ways to title this section including the loss of meaning, the increase of noise, the loss of context, the freedom of meaning, and any other combination thereof.
The internet connects us non-locally. Non-locality doesn’t guarantee diversity, but it does become another dimension in how people can find non-coherence. Naturally, many minds with potentially different information will not magically agree on any one way to understand what is happening.
With social media, we see an overwhelming number of opinions, all with different assumptions, interpretations, and conclusions.
This incompatibility of understanding leads to an erosion of more traditional contexts established by broadcast media. Today, people have reorganized into new groupings that carry a shared context of meaning, what we call ideology.
As people online were freed of the bonds of traditional identities reinforced by the limited mix of people who were physically around them, so unique bonds have arisen between non-local groups.
Some examples of the unique bonds include anti-vaxers, the re-alignment of political parties, the revitalization of religion, the rise of fetish groups, online gaming clans, subreddits, trans, #metoo, and message groups like /b/. All of these express the splintering of identity and meaning every which way. This splintering is further accelerated by each individual having the internet, to find others who would share in the same activity while being exposed to many others not sharing much of anything at all. I coin this milieu post-contextuality.
I explore this erosion of context in my article Sensemaking in the Coherency Desert: 21st Century Participation in a post-Contextual World.
We have a choice in what meanings we accept as valid. No one can stop us from thinking or believing what we really want. But freedom of thought isn’t our problem.
The problem also isn’t that we have too much or too little information or that we have new contexts.
The problem is that many of us treat our information-saturated meanings and emotions as objective reality so that the non-locality of the internet becomes socially disjoint as people with different meanings interact while expecting coherency.
Essentially being able to make a choice in the meaning we adopt means that we will also end up making a choice in the context we want to inhabit. When we take those contextual meanings as being an absolutely applicable worldview, we mistake those contexts for reality.
There are many different groups today that can exemplify this freedom of choice, although depending on who you identify with, some groups may sound more legit than others. Some of these groups (not yet named) include Christians, the so-called SJW, flat-earthers, the alt-right, and vegans.
2.3.1 The Real Choice
When the association between identity and social role started to be dismantled, so the shared emotional framework that was carried with the traditional lifeworld also began to loosen.
I explore how our emotional framework is central to our identity in this article We the People.
As capitalism explored the idea of allowing anyone to do/be/buy anything, so we began to lose the shared validity of certain meanings. However, while some people may believe the validity of certain narratives is no longer acceptable, many of those narratives still operate.
Thus the word privilege has emerged to name the social bias in enabling/approving some people at the expense of enabling/approving others.
Privilege is one way to understand the questionable validity of certain shared narratives. In the 1990s, cultural criticism rose in colleges, aimed at removing privilege for the purposes of equality. In a twisted sense, cultural criticism did the work of justifying the expansion of consumer and labor pools as a further erosion of the traditional lifeworld from begone economic orders.
As the expanse of markets enabled traditionally undervalued people to experience value and abundance, so those people came to find their voice, be it feminist, post-colonialist, queer or any other identity group. Of course, many of these groups are also not completely cohesive as self-identified members may question each other’s validity. This lack of cohesion is called intersectionality.
This difference in the adoption of meaning arises because we assess information based on how coherent new information is with what we already understand. Most of us understand based on what we accept and reject from our own experiences, emotions, and subconscious narrative identifications.
Coherency of information gives us a feeling of certainty. Many mistake the feeling of certain to mean that their understanding equals reality.
This is not accurate. Reality cannot be determined by a feeling, otherwise, this emotional sense would have evolved instead of consciousness. As consciousness is about predicting, navigating, and ultimately manipulating reality, a direct emotional guide to reality would supplant the need for consciousness.
No, certainty is a feeling we get when new information fits the information we already have.
Additionally, reality cannot be determined by the consistency of understanding. If the truth can be decided by consistency, then the rationalist philosophers of the 17th century would have been sufficient for explaining reality. We would have never needed to develop scientific practices as a priori thought could more easily do the job. (As an interesting example of consistency of understanding in ideology, see this article criticizing creationists who are mocking flat-earthers for not understanding science.)
Thus, the freedom of identity and meaning very significantly necessitates a loss of shared certainty about what is meaningful/happening in the external world.
In other words, the loss of context, meaning and group coherency all stem from how we as individual people no longer share feelings of certainty. As different aspects of reality become more valuable dependent on which group you ask, so we can no longer even agree on what choices we should even consider.
By mistaking the certainty an ideology can give us with reality, we often now believe that we have a choice of reality along with a choice of identity.
3. “Post”-Ideology’s Structure
The assumption that there can only be one true meaning is one of the flaws of modernism. Interestingly, this assumption is also a flaw with early postmodernism. Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulacrum assumed that a multiplicity of meaning meant there could be no meaning since there is no agreement.
Meaning doesn’t have to be universal to be experienced. Meaning is whatever makes a difference for us. Something that makes no difference is literally meaningless.
For Baudrillard meaning is a symbolic endeavor so that what remains excessive of symbolism doubles as a shadow of itself. As language has its own logic independent of reality so language has an influence on reality even as its influence leaves no detectable trace.
The real, the real object is supposed to be equal to itself, it is supposed to resemble itself like a face in a mirror — and this virtual similitude is in effect the only definition of real — and any attempt, including the holographic one, that rests on it, will inevitably miss its object, because it does not take its shadow into account (precisely the reason why it does not resemble itself) — this hidden face where the object crumbles, its secret. The holographic attempt literally jumps over its shadow, and plunges into transparency, to lose itself there.
Expressed above is the essential assumption of post-structuralism, that while language could express reality, there is always a gap between what it expresses and what is.
Post-structuralism arose out of a critique of structuralism, which in anthropology assumed that narrative forms provided meaning. Jacques Derrida, who would lay the groundwork for post-structuralism in his essay Sign, Structure and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences noted how the judgment of each culture depended on different central symbolisms that are nominalizable despite their instability.
Derrida provides a few points that complement our understanding of how our reward system functions.
- Identity is dependent on a centralized locus that acts to totalize the context
- That context is never totalized even while that central locus is named. In part, this is because the center, the metaphysics of presence, for that context is differently constructed for each expression of meaning
- The instability of that context allows freeplay, as Derrida calls it. Freeplay actually serves to renew the illusion of a centralized locus by which an identity lays claim to stability as the center.
All this activity is possible because language is at least partially disconnected from the shared physical context in which we all coexist (I call this shared physical context reality for brevity).
This disconnection of language from reality is more profound than a simple rejection of ideal structures. Ideational structures require totalization of context. Ideational structures also require the stability of language relative to reality.
The assumptions of a stable language are developed in modernism through the school of logical positivism. Logical positivism assumes that language can describe reality in a meaningful way through a form of hyper-empiricism. This hyper-empiricism is neo-Kantian in that it assumes that our linguistic/phenomenal world correlates with one external/noumenal reality.
Quentin Meillassoux calls this kind of thinking correlationism in his book After Finitude.
Correlationism is the assumption that thinking and Being are equivalent so that one is not possible without and entails the other. Correlationism relates to neo-Kantian thought in that critiques of correlationism reject the idea that noumenal reality is inexpressible. Meillassoux points out that language and science can describe worlds that we cannot experience and thus have no being, even while we can think about those worlds. Quantum singularities, the surface of the sun, and the primordial Earth are all examples of worlds we can think and do calculations about, even if such worlds will always lack Being due to the experiential limitations of being human.
For instance, Object Oriented Ontology is one such philosophical movement centered on things rather than subjectivity.
If we accept that language has a logic that is independent of reality and yet can capture aspects of reality, then post-structuralist ideas best reflect our lifeworld today. This is because, like many philosophies in their contemporaneous contexts, post-structuralism was both created by the conditions of our lifeworld as it also provides a way of discussing them.
At this point, we should refine what post-structuralism is by contrasting it with postmodernism.
3.1 Beyond Postmodernism
Today we live beyond the boundaries of postmodern aesthetic but not the boundaries of post-structuralism.
Post-structuralism is a theoretical framework that deconstructs meaning within cultures and contexts by showing how meanings are justified and constructed at the expense of alternate meanings that may also be found within those same texts.
Postmodernism also challenges mainstream authority but only by challenging universality. Authority is justified through an insistence on a universal standard by which only the authority (unsurprisingly) has exclusive access. Postmodernism challenges universality by recognizing the legitimacy of alternate narratives, including feminism, post-colonialism, queer theory, and so on. Collectively this challenge is called cultural criticism.
In that sense, a multi-culturalist world is compatible with postmodernism. Postmodernism is the rejection of a singular narrative frame that explains who everyone is. Rejection of a universal narrative opens the space for many other subgroups to claim legitimacy, as explored by movies like Shrek.
Postmodernism is also compatible with the endless play of the internet. As narratives are shared, so any aspect of that narrative could become an identity. As mentioned, before this open legitimacy allows recent fictional narratives, like anime, my little pony, Star Wars and Star Trek to gain audiences who identify with those fictions. This endless play is the single greatest freedom postmodernism affords. People become free to identify with their consumer products if they want to, marry inanimate objects or play in increasingly peculiar but personally satisfying ways.
Yet the single greatest freedom of postmodernism is also its major failing: Postmodernism does nothing to address which narrative should or should not be adopted, leading to the current culture wars surrounding issues of political correctness and political policy.
Thus, postmodernism can also been seen to be compatible with the current rise of the alt-right and white nationalism. What is ironic about these forms of right-wing reactionary identities is that while they often reject postmodernism as untrue propaganda from the left, these identities posit the same kind of identity politics as other identities that legitimatize under the absence of a universal narrative. In that sense, this is because many of these conservative identities base their origins on more traditional identities, as those who were privileged desire reinstating traditional narratives to combat their feelings of irrelevancy.
However, a multiculturalist world would be challenged by post-structuralism as under post-structuralism, each culture’s view is deconstructed through the very assumptions of each cultural context.
Postmodernism and post-structuralism are not strictly incompatible but they do not always align. Postmodernism remains clueless in providing criteria for considering which narrative or authority should reign.
Post-structuralism also can’t really answer which authority makes more sense, but it can still provide value by providing the means to reject authorities that are based solely on their own consistency by finding areas where their consistency is forced.
Post-structuralism provides the means to develop a 21st-century media literacy by letting us spot the presence of ideology, although the effectiveness of that ideology in navigating the extra-linguistic world is a matter outside of post-structuralism’s domain.
4. Ideological Literacy
Before we examine some consequences of a post-structural world view, let’s review what an ideology is.
4.1 Introducing 21st-Century Ideologies
While the effects of information technology, capitalism and the expansion of human knowledge have occurred naturally, that is without intention, it should be easy to recognize the very real dangers of living in separate realities from that of your neighbors.
Separate identities are not a problem as long as people can still coordinate with each other. Thus not sharing reality is more problematic than having a difference of identity or a difference in shared narrative.
Perhaps not unironically, the vast amount of information available due to information technology, often lauded a symbol of human triumph, as the greatest repository of knowledge, has fragmented our shared reality.
Perhaps our shared reality has always been fragmented, but now at least, regardless of its past state, due to social media, we can witness just how fragmented it is.
Interestingly, if you assume that language can be an accurate reflection of reality, then naively, more information should inevitably lead us all to a greater agreement about what reality is like. Yet, with more information, we end up with less agreement.
In part, this is because of the limits of what each of us can digest. Additionally, as we tend to build off of the information we have already accepted as true, with so much different information available, we can end up with very different understandings of what the world is like from those around us.
This situation is unique. The fragmentation of reality due to information overload has never been a problem before. For most of history, people who were local to each other have been exposed to basically the same pieces of information, having similar levels of education, similar cultural backgrounds, and similar access to knowledge repositories.
As aforementioned, a non-local internet exposes us to very different sources of information (as we all like different things) with very non-local people. Additionally, ideologies that arise from that non-local interaction do not benefit from the interpersonal calibration local interactions can enable. What is unique about these new 21st-century ideologies is that they arise in non-local contexts through mostly only the symbolic exchange that is possible with current information technology.
In other words, these 21st-century ideologies lack a shared physical reality for their members to interact in. Without a shared lifeworld, these ideologies have to rely on some other means to maintain their context. Usually, that means that these ideologies, more so than more traditional ones, rely on linguistic consistency and echo chambers.
Perhaps due to the heavy use of symbolic signaling, what makes each of these ideological views susceptible to post-structuralist critiques is that each of these ideologies engages in a kind of concrete thinking to self justify. Instead of having a shared basis in physical reality, there is only a shared symbolic reality.
Concrete thinking is a psychology term used to talk about how individuals develop cognition. I am borrowing the concept here for its usefulness.
As Derrida has pointed out, each ideology takes for granted at least one central category (a center) whose meaning is directly correlated with some assumed real-world phenomenon that is supposedly both verifiable and independent of language.
Independent existence and verifiability are assumptions that the central category is both nominalizable and stable (not open to interpretation but also symbolically expressible). This combination of linguistic and empirical stability is what I call “concrete” (whereas purely linguistic stability is, in a traditional philosophical sense, “absolute”). Either way, an absolute or concreteness provides a metaphysics of presence that functions as an anchor, an axiom that grounds that ideology’s evaluation of reality as inevitable and true.
Before we get to the post-structural methods, as an aside, it is important to note that the truth status of a given ideology is independent of something being an ideology.
4.1.1 The Truth of Ideology
Ideologies form as logical-linguistic systems derived from basic assumptions/interpretations about the way the world is. Thus, is possible for an ideology to have correct assumptions/interpretations and/or correct conclusions and still be an ideology. Ideologies are assumptions that form a totalizing system which locks its believers into thinking they have an understanding of what is real. Ideologies create blindness because ideologues mistake the consistency of their thinking as signifying reality.
What’s dangerous about this is that believers of ideology, in thinking they know what is real, refuse to accept information/interpretations that do not fit their ideology. Instead, they seem to prefer assuming that such information is somehow invalid. How can said believers make good decisions if they may refuse to accept what is?
Post-structuralism’s assumption that language and reality are independent means that there is a gap in correlating words to the world. Following the current proliferation of points of view, that gap is also not the same for everyone.
The world is a complex place. For instance, assume cynically that communism is a situation where one person does all the work and everyone else lives off of them. If we also hold that communism and capitalism are mutually exclusive then it is impossible that communism could co-exist within capitalism. Yet within traditional families that have a single adult who is both breadwinner and caregiver, we have both the capitalist relations (of worker-consumer) and the (cynical) communist relations (worker-parasite). With the stated assumptions above, it would be hard for a believer in the mutual exclusion of communism and capitalism to see traditional families as having a communistic nature. Likewise, if you assume that humans were little more than walking homo economicus then it would be hard to see altruism as a genuine expression people are capable of. An adherent to homo economicus would be likely to seek any alternate explanation of altruism that appeals to greed in order to preserve their ideology.
So how can we see past blindness?
The value of post-structuralism is a framework that can allow us to see through language so that we can realize the incredible degrees of freedom available in every situation. The basic method is to try and find antinomies within linguistic consistency and consider the possibility that words aren’t as stable as we might assume they are. Seeing the world post-structurally doesn’t mean never being wrong or always being right. Post-structuralism necessitates that we be open to new possibilities instead of being locked into seeing the world in terms of a few centralized symbolic ideas.
There are many authors who have explored post-structuralism. Many of them present their own philosophies. What I will do now is introduce three aspects of how humans embody language. Understanding these aspects can help you identify ideologies and how to avoid them if that is what you want to do. (If you have made it this far, then most likely you are curious.) These aspects aren’t solely post-structural. I think a fuller approach should carry some science and some methodologies from religious heuristics.
- Note the construction of a metaphysics of presence.
- Recognize how emotional association in language leads us to often treat our ideologies as real.
- Challenge our own reinforced assumptions by considering how the world might be the same even if our assumptions were rejected.
The best situation, given our reward system, is to loosen the unconscious holds we have on who we think we are. Young children often have not yet fully identified with an ideology. Their ability to be enchanted by anything is the wonder an open reward system provides. Once I got past the wall of cynicism entailed by continually losing ideological grounding I rediscovered my innate love of learning again.
Of course, post-structuralism is just one toolset. One post-structuralist concept will be discussed in the next section 4.2. Section 4.3 will discuss some scientific findings related to our reinforced learning. And then finally, there are many methods beyond post-structuralism. Many of these methods can be found in the gnostic nooks of many different ideologies, such as Christianity. Section 4.4 will briefly look at some of these methods.
4.2 The Metaphysics of False Dichotomies
One way to test for the presence of an ideology is to note the presence of a clear fixed meaning that is universally applicable. Such a meaning organizes people by providing a standard to determine who is knowable (through the standard, usually those who are good) from those who are not (the bad).
In philosophy, this would be articulated by a metaphysics of presence. In a narrative, it would simply be the main character with whom the audience identifies (or is meant to identify) with vs the one who embodies the antithesis of what one is meant to identify with. Narrative provides the means for determining who is knowable; that is, who is at the center good. In fantasy stories, the main character often serves as the anchor for all that is good, so that without them the world would fall apart.
With the news, sometimes people or events are featured. The journalist, if desired, could present the subject as one who is knowable. This is the power of narrative. We can be directed to be a certain way, implying one or another social order dependent on some moralism meant to tell us who we should be.
The danger of narrative comes about when actual people come to believe that they are the hero and that some category of people occupies the antithesis of them. In a weird way, the mere presence of those others can reinforce for the self, their own narrative. In most ideologies, people have a non-relationship with the other, yet that other still plays a structural role in ensuring the self.
In fact, post-colonialism began when Edward Said in his book Orientalism, published in 1978, recognized that the East’s identity was largely a fixture to guarantee that the West, by contrast, appeared more desirable. Said writes:
“Orientalism is never far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying “us” Europeans as against all “those” non-Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe; the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is an addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical thinker might have had different views on the matter.”
Essentially, this false dichotomy of Orient and Occident would be constructed discursively so that the Occident could identify to be the desirable qualities; ie, masculine, rational, logical, honorable, honest, ethical, and moral. In contrast, the Orient, in Western discourse, be presented as the “not-West”; ie, feminine, irrational, emotional, dishonorable, dishonest, unethical, and immoral.
This false dichotomy of the other continues today. In fact, we can notice ideologies based on the extreme bias by which the ideology is constructed. As mentioned before, the bias in ideology is expressible as privilege.
For instance, Jordan Peterson’s thought system forms an ideology in that he needs Neo-Marxist Postmodernists to exist in a certain way for his thought system to have value. The same is true for thought systems that villainize others. Some common others as targets of ideology include Republicans, Queers, Trans, and Muslims.
Essentially, post-structuralist views are anti-correlationist. As we can think about various central categories in different ways, so the people referred to by these categories exist independently of what we think of them. Some core correlations that are used to anchor ideology to privilege one group of people over another include gender, economics, psychoanalysis, race, language, profession, education, religion, wealth, and IQ. Basically, any category that can be used to hierarchicalize/evaluate people carries ideological implications which may include privilege.
Ideologies that preach equality, for instance, may privilege those who have signifiers associated with non-equality.
If a given category has a metaphysics of presence, then it also has a transcendental relationship to all the phenomenon within that ideology. That relationship becomes transcendental when a relationship to that central category defines all other phenomena. For instance, an ideology of racial purity would see all social relationships governed in terms of racial purity: Any other relationship would lack agency in being able to account more why society is the way that it is then the element of racial purity. Another example of ideology would be that of vulgar Marxists who understand all social relationships in terms of class struggle so that feminist critiques bear no water. Likewise, libertarians might see all social relationships in terms of self-interest so that when markets crash, they might reflexively claim that government interference was the reason for the crash and not some failure of the market to self regulate.
A consequence of the rigidity of central categories is that anything that corrupts must be explained through the actions of an imagined other since all purity is thought to stem from that category.
Thus, one easy way to understand that you are in the presence of an ideologue is if the ideologue needs some group of people to be a certain way for their own ideology to be stable. Ideology distorts reality by imposing a limited logic to judge all of reality. Thus, the distortions of that logic must be contained in residual values that are banished onto the false opposites, the other.
4.2.1 Dichotomies from any Standard
For example, this article What Scientific Term or Concept ought to be more Widely Known? by Scott Aaronson poses an interesting question as to whether we should see the world in terms of determinism (to see the universe as arriving at the future state necessitated by the present state) or prediction (to see the universe as being probable to a future state based on the present state).
The article is fairly abstract but written very concisely. Aaronson’s conclusion is to pick prediction because he claims determinism has “hidden” states in the present to necessitate the future state. He finds determinism less desirable because a determinist “adds” a non-empirical state to the situation, one that is thus “hidden”. This non-empirical state is an analog to the metaphysics of presence.
Aaronson is correct in that determinism often carries an ideological undertone, in the form of a necessary mechanism that determines/ensures the outcome. What Aaronson misses is that a predictive view is also ideological with an added state via the statistical metric used in the prediction. This metric is “added” as a non-empirically fixed point by which the present is measured. For example, with prediction, a data scientist may claim that a particular future state will have a 90% chance of happening. With prediction, a state is also added in the form of the metric itself.
The false opposite that Aaronson creates is between a pure predictive worldview (pure in that he claims the predictive worldview doesn’t require anything outside itself to explain anything) and an impure deterministic worldview.
Obviously, the hidden state for determinism isn’t hidden because the determinist knows about it. Now it may be possible that predictionists can find when a given state is 100% as predictionists can always define a state based on a condition that has already occurred. Thus predictionists may seem more empirical, because they could “say” with something that is provably possible. Yet what both determinists and predictionists have in common is that both choose what the added state should be.
In that sense, neither determinists nor predictionists are empirically pure because judgment requires an abstraction that is by its nature not empirical.
In a post-structuralist sense, statistics is ontological in that the metrics used are reflected in the outcomes as the outcomes are expressed in terms of the metric. Theoretical physicist and post-structuralist Karen Barad explains, in Meeting the Universe Halfway, that the object of measurement and the apparatus of measurement interacts to create a metric that latter colors future situations. The future situations carry a shadow added from the original interaction. Barad applies this unique reading to the wave/particle duality and to gender identity in a very post-structuralist manner.
We either refine our ideas through the universe, or we evaluate the universe with our ideas. We cannot untangle one from the other. As Barad points out, this gap between symbolism and physical reality is a dualism that cannot be revoked because that is how language functions. Language functions to express meaning. Thus, language (and meaning) must be independent of reality in order for different meanings to be expressible. Yet language cannot be too independent of shared reality, otherwise, humans of the same language also wouldn’t be able to communicate.
In this way, ideology in the 21st century serves as a kind of contextual envelope. As ideology carries “added” relationships that are pre-defined as valuable, ideology creates a transcendental context by which all phenomenon is tied according to its logic so that deviations from that logic are dismissed as lacking agency and thus unreal. The internet is particularly harsh in this regard, as anyone’s beliefs can be mocked as being self causing.
When such dichotomies are applied to people, as is often the interest with most ideologies (to apply them to people), ideologies will create a false dichotomy. These dichotomies are “false” because the conditions under which they operate are arbitrary to the ideology and may not represent how other people are.
On the one side, there are good people who are valid according to some standard. On the other, there are bad people who are invalid; who are to be blamed for corrupting the standard. In WW2, the Nazis created their ideology centering on their racial purity while blaming the Jews for everything undesirable about German society. The ideologue Nazi (say, Hilter) then claimed that logically, removing Jews from German society would lead to a restoration of everything pure and Aryan, leading to some utopic Germanic vision.
Online today, we see the presence of ideology when people blame everything on some other group of people, usually a group that is without any “valid” voice.
This blame also often functions as the epitome of virtue signaling for that ideologue. As that ideological standard proposes a split in how we understand the world (one side good, the other bad), so that standard carries with it an emotional overlay by which pride and shame express which side of the ideological divide you are.
The most interesting emotion, however, is the emotion felt at the border: Outrage.
4.3 Outrage Porn, Emotions, and Ideology
One of the most obvious relationships with ideology and emotion is outrage.
As ideology can be about anything, it can be hard to spot the role emotions play as the glue for ideology. This section will discuss some thoughts on how emotions and ideas work. Section 4.4 will discuss some thoughts on how to undo the association of emotions and ideas.
4.3.1 Tropes and Ideology
If you’ve read some articles I’ve written, you’d know that I am a fan of the cognitive linguist George Lakoff’s work. The first consideration is essentially emotional associations with words. In his book The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain, Lakoff explains that Republicans and Democrats have different emotional associations with different families of tropes. Using electrodes on people’s heads to measure their reaction to language, Lakoff concludes that the success of the Republicans deals with their ability to tap into their constituent’s emotions through rhetorical tropes more successfully than the Democrats. Being a Democrat, Lakoff hoped that by writing this book Democrats could more successfully promote their politics. Lakoff had such strong hopes, that he actually started Rockridge Institute, a thinktank, meant to help the Democrats with their political messaging. In my opinion, this use of his scientific work is not unwarranted but he is reacting to his own ideological assumptions about what is good and bad and therefore misses the deeper value of his own work.
Weaponizing these methods is not the best way to bring about a better world. Weaponizing his work in rhetoric and emotional processing means manipulating more people, which does nothing to further society. Science should be about developing society, not about who is right, although having close-minded people in charge would certainly not develop society. Furthering society should be about educating people to understand what is happening and why they make the choices they do make so that they don’t fall prey to manipulation.
It is in this spirit that this article is written.
4.3.2 Against Emotional Realism
Emotional realism is the non-conceptual side of ideology.
These two sides can be expressed in the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman explores two different systems of processing information, one fast (an associative machine) and one slow (the lazy controller). Critiques about Kahneman’s classifications aside (which assumes that the first system is singular when it is in fact made of many different mechanisms), the first system thinks quickly, jumping to easy conclusions. The second thinks slowly, step by logical step but often attempts to preserve calories by taking cognitive short cuts whenever possible. Both systems can be tricked given how information is presented, and both systems are often at odds with each other so that the very people making a decision with one system will make the contrary decisions when the other is engaged.
Kahneman’s book is worth reading, especially in our information infused world. His main takeaway for this article was already mentioned: that certainty is an emotion independent of reality. Being tricked is not a matter of someone else having intentions of fooling us. Being tricked is a matter of our use of emotion to decide when we should stop thinking and just accept one or another thought as “good enough”. Kahneman explains:
“We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But ease and coherence do not guarantee that a belief held in confidence is true. The associative machine is set to suppress doubt and evoke ideas and information that are compatible with the currently dominate story. A mind that follows WYSIATI [what you see is all there is] will achieve high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know. It is therefore not surprising that many of us are prone to have high confidence in unfounded intuitions. Klein and I eventually agreed on an important principle: the confidence that people have in their intuition is not a reliable guide to their validity. In other words, do not trust anyone — including yourself — to tell you how much you should trust their judgment.”
Kahneman’s approach is very different from Lakoff in that Kahneman is more interested in presenting his findings than telling us how to use them. Kahneman explains how difficult it is to be deliberate and thorough in processing information instead of using the associative machine. This warning is relevant as the point of this article is to avoid getting trapped into misleading paradigms. After all, any paradigm will be misleading if we use it to explain every occasion.
However, when we combine these two sections (4.3.1 and 4.3.2) with ideology, we get to a startling realization.
4.3.3 Emotional Realism is the basis for Community
Ideology is essentially emotional management for the purposes of getting people on the same page.
Interestingly, Slavoj Žižek in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology noted how many modern rock concerts utilize the images of facism without ideological content. Fascism works best when everyone believes and have the same emotions.
Also, as pointed out by René Girard, this is what rituals were for; to get people on the same page emotionally at the same time so the group could be coherent as a group. Only today, our rituals are more about shopping during Christmas, shopping during Valentines Day and shopping during Thanksgiving. Beyond that, we have music that marks each generation (as we have music to mark our holidays).
Ideology is a nest of ideas that are associated with a nest of feelings. These feelings guide us on how to react just as ideas guide us on how to behave. The certainty of the associative machine in combination with emotionally charged tropes allows many of us to anchor our identity on a given ideology’s central concepts. These strong emotional reactions tell us who we are in the world, the kind of world it is, and what we need to do in order to preserve the value that would ensure our continuity. If we co-exist with others who share these reactions, you can bet this could be a force to be reckoned with.
Strong emotional reactions are more likely to occur when we encounter the limits of our continuity according to ideology. This is also what leaders do; present speeches that deploy meaning according to the ideology of the group, as with the speech below which highlights our identity and our way of life while dealing with the emotions of 9/11.
For groups of people protecting their resources from outsiders, strong emotional reactions may have often been useful for safeguarding boundaries. Of course former President Bush doesn’t establish feeling, he re-directs the feelings that were already invoked by 9/11. If you are an American, like I am, the video above was sobering to watch even though 9/11 occurred nearly 20 years ago.
Strong emotions reactions signify significant identification. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address is another powerful moment whose emotive force bound us as a group.
Through online advertisement and media, these type of emotive reactions has been gamified. However, it is important to note that our collective confusion today is not due solely to advertisers, news or media. Outrage porn and propaganda’s emergence was inevitable as the online community began to decohere due to information overload.
For ideologies based online, communal boundaries are far more nebulous due to non-locality and the limits of online interaction. Even within homogenized groups, linguistically charged difference will polarize. This kind of polarization has happened with both the Left and Right as continual discussion has continuously fragmented groups formed in broadcast media into increasingly hairsplitting fringe collections.
What the internet has shown us, is that even within the “same” ideological group enough of a gap in language exists to split us apart. Fake news and other clickbait will capitalize on emotional responses as long as people take their emotions as objective reality. People who live in emotional realism are susceptible to the simplest form of ideology, virtue signaling through reaction, reinforced through the likes of outrage porn.
Ideas and emotions are two sides of the same coin.
For further elucidation, see Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain.
Ideology as a conceptual realism has an emotional double, an emotional realism. The next section addresses the intellectual and emotional analog of false dichotomies described in section 4.2.
This brings us to the last aspect I will cover in this essay, which deals directly with the fragmentation and decoherence experienced today.
4.4 Integration
Meaning is a two-sided coin, as words and concepts carry latent emotional content. Likewise, emotions are often encoded words.
Because of the dual nature of meaning (emotional and linguistic), humans identify and bond through empathy (mirror neurons) further enabled by narrative contextualization.
This combination has proven extremely successful as we humans have dominated the planet with our collective agency.
As mentioned previously, emotions are useful guides when situations have clear meanings that emotions can highlight. Given today’s increasingly complex world, emotions with assumed meaning interfere with our ability to process new information. Exposure to information which contradicts the rough and ready meanings we have already accepted can be jarring, threatening and thus inspiring further emotional reactions for us to double down on the meanings we identify with.
The encoding of emotions and meaning into situations happens with great speed. This isn’t solely the result of information technology. Meaning is becoming a private matter as communities vanish.
As the lifeworld became maintained through capitalist institutions instead of by the community, nuclear families emerged because we could buy everything. As parents raise children in isolation, the meaning parents impart was no longer mediated through a community. If the parent was unfair or biased, the community could provide clues to the child. While parents don’t always encode meaning within the structured frame of ideology, encoding unbalanced meaning, i.e., trauma, is of the same caliber as ideological bias.
Meaning is unbalanced when it perpetuates a worldview that functions as an absolute frame for understanding future situations/information. This brings us to the current buzzword of individual (spiritual and business) development: trauma and authenticity.
Thus far, I have been highlighting how we are recipients of media and ideology. The problem of unbalanced meaning is an old issue.
4.4.1 Re-contextualizing Bias
Many methods in spiritual, new age, and business development circles recognize the limitations and excesses of unbalanced bias. People in these circles seek to address these excesses, through practices including neurolinguistic programming, reiki, psychotherapy, the landmark forum, and the completion process. Additionally, many of these methodologies are supplemented by methods that come from very old religious practices such as prayer, meditation, ayurvedic medicine, acupuncture, and yoga, to name a few.
What new and old methods have in common is that these methods only manipulate the internal connections/associations we have formed. Thus, such methods can heal or they can damage.
Healing under these methods requires integrating different aspects that are fragmented, such as shame with pride and love with fear. Integration entails balancing out the emotions/meanings in a given situation with other emotions/meanings which we rejected due to our unconscious attachment to particular emotions/meanings.
For instance, within a given relationship, instead of understanding that a partner’s absence due to work means that they don’t care, the partner could see the extreme amount of work as evidence that they do care and want to provide.
Of course, such perceptions are merely speculative unless both partners authentically communicate. Authenticity only works if both partners are aware enough and honest enough to say what they actually want and where they actually stand so that both parties try to work out something where each gets what they want.
Traditionally religions often served as institutions where people who had difficulty accepting biased meaning could find reprieve. For example, both Zen koans, with their parables, and the teachings of Jesus Christ, with his mindblowing behavior, sought to undermine assumptions about the order of things.
Zen koans often expressed paradoxical meanings so that students could meditate on them. By focusing their internal associations on these paradoxes, the students could perhaps find ways to de-associate absolute meanings about what was real. Here is a short list of some more famous koans.
Unlike koans, Christ did not use atomic statements within an institutional practice. Rather, his teachings were given within the context of the Jewish traditions of his day. Many of his behaviors were aimed at flipping social hierarchy, such as talking with women, cavorting with lepers and tax collectors, and openly questioning the learned men of his time.
When we take into account that every culture has an ideology, it makes sense that many religions would express their teachings along with undoing the accepted worldviews of that time and place. Since we no longer live in Roman-occupied Jerusalem, many of the sayings debunking the values of that period may seem a little strange. Here are some of them.
Today, we may not practice Zen meditation with koans anymore. However, the lyrics of contemporary Christian music carry the tradition of expressing paradox as a form of freedom from the everyday values, associations, and meanings we currently hold.
Of course, religious groups often have their own imposed worldview that is supposed to be supported by that religion.
This is not surprising considering the emotional realism/ideology is essential for cementing group coherency.
Message and community are continuous reflections of each other, each reinforcing the other in a feedback loop, so it is not possible to address emotional realism and ideology without also addressing the emotional and conceptual entanglement each present.
This amounts to experiencing a piece of media and instead of seeing it wholly within the terms of our bias, before asking ourselves what would be the case of the world if that piece of media had different meanings.
Would the world be so different if X did not automatically mean Y instead of Z? What if there was some merit to seeing Z in X? Examine your emotions and then intellectually understand that this meaning was always available. Consequently, your emotions may be why you have adopted this meaning. Your emotions may be triggered by a deeper scenario of personal pain independent of the situation at hand.
In some ways, this is like finding ways to advertise a product traditionally used by one group to other groups. Such advertisement often invokes a pain people have, whereby the product is the solution.
Let’s go through some examples.
Ideology is not the only worldview that can have a biased meaning. Biases are often stumbled upon honestly.
4.4.1.1 Bias and Consistency are two sides of the same Coin
Conspiracy theories are one step away from an ideology because conspiracy theories, like ideology, too easily target blame on some group of people for all the problems of our situation. For that reason, the work of Caitlin Johnstone, while interesting and not without merit, too easily labels one group of people as corrupt and everyone else as good.
This is a problem with finding some key content and then extending that idea outward to encompass everything as though that encompassing is the same as a valid explanation.
Ideas capture one aspect of reality. We can then cohere aspects of that reality that align with our idea. If expanding that idea “fits”, then the temptation is to keep extending it until everything fits in it. Once that fits well, it feels good. We can take that good feeling, that certainty, that this idea is an explanation. Bias isn’t just about imagined evil others.
Ironically this “fitting” of a concept and then expanding it, is how this article was written. If I say something that doesn’t fit what you know, this will feel wrong and you may reject what I am saying. You may decide to reject this article for reasons that are completely tangential to the point I am making.
For example, we can also have very smart people, such as Vinay Gupta, with more nuanced ideas, do exactly the same kind of extension as Caitlin Johnstone. The problem with such pontification is that often we do spot some corollary trends between ideas, people, and events. But which caused which? Were people the cause, or did people become enabled because of an event that was the cause? Rarely is the case that one aspect of reality caused all of reality to be the way that it is as present situations are influenced by everything in the past.
For instance, this article could benefit from more nuanced input about the reward system and its relationship with learning.
Thinking about the present in terms of ideas intellectually can appear universal because ideas are expressed universally. This universality too easily obscures the very personal origins of how we got to the ideas we got to.
For example, Dave Cullen’s Rediscovering Faith: My Journey Back To Christianity is both thoughtful and interesting. However, while his reasoning is consistent with itself, it lacks at times, some factual bearing as he reasons about topics he isn’t fully educated on. Essentially, like many who seek consistency, he provides reasoning that bridges the points he’s accepted by ignoring alternate meanings that may not fit. It’s likely that he’s just unaware on certain topics (rather than just lying). After all, if he has the conclusions he wants, then why should he research regarding some auxiliary thesis when that thesis serves its purpose in creating a consistent argument that supports his desired conclusion?
In his video, he explains that his journey back to Christianity stems from an emotional origin than anything else. His added reasons for why Christianity is great included providing social order and being metaphysically true.
4.4.1.2 Consistency as Reality are expressions of a Metaphysics of Presence
The truth is, arguments about the veracity of Cullen’s conclusions are tangential to this article. His added reasons appear more universal than his personal emotional reasons. While his added reasons sound nobler, as it includes all of humanity, these added reasons only augment what he already likes about what Christianity implies for him. After all, he does admit to not knowing why things are the way they are.
We are more interested in how he got to the conclusions he’s adopted, as that shows how his worldview functions to situate himself in the world more than it explains anything about the world as it is.
Here’s why consistency in reason doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.
As any scientist or truth seeker should already know, the state of the world is too complex to untangle completely, let alone be able to explain consistently without any hiccups.
After all, as anyone who has tried to implement a complex plan with multiple parties has discovered (anyone who has ever done business), it can be incredibly difficult to coordinate even willing professionals to accomplish a task like the purchase of a house or to write a program. Any number of contingencies can and will arise.
This is why being able to spot correlationism is so handy. More so today than ever, smart people keep getting hypnotized by their own content. When pontificating, people also forget that more often than not, unexpected and random influences can happen, interfering with their account of how things actually are.
Said another way, correlationism is the belief that the consistency of thought reflects the supposed consistency of reality. Smart people often mistake their thinking for actual being.
The world is rich enough to support many different experiences and meanings because we are all in the world. Yet is impossible to live without bias. We have a view of what things mean as each of our situations are unique. Yet that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to consider information that can help us. This entails an understanding that others are not to themselves what they mean to us, as we are not to them what we mean to us.
Two methods for accepting what is difficult to accept is mindfulness, developed from Buddhist meditation techniques and what psychologists today call radical acceptance. The goal of each is to allow the practitioner to accept what is real, at the moment, before of them than to use past states to make future predictions.
I am not going to explore either of these in depth but consider what the world could be like if we at least try to consider how reality might be if we don’t outright reject that which doesn’t seem to fit.
4.4.2 Mindful Acceptance
Radical acceptance is aimed at helping survivors of narcissism and trauma learn to accept reality without their emotional and philosophical frame crashing.
Mindfulness is aimed at helping people be in the present moment. Being in the present is the opposite of invoking outside meaning. Mindfulness can help one deal just with what’s one is present with. The techniques involve meditation and breathing.
What would it mean if your romantic partner (or even somebody on FaceBook) genuinely thought your idea was not of value? Mindful acceptance would allow one to see how those opinions may have merit without entailing an emotional crisis. Someone on FaceBook may be an expert in this field and have a perspective that could help strengthen your ideas. Your romantic partner may not like your idea, but that doesn’t mean they don’t find you to also be valueless.
If we are to have a society that functions it is imperative that we learn to accept information that doesn’t fit our frame. Given that we all have different frames, this practice can help us share the same reality. This doesn’t mean excusing bad behavior or giving up our point of view. But it does mean not hiding in comfortable habits when it comes to processing what is going on, as reality is vastly richer than our cognitive frame can ever account for.
Living with what is happening in its entirety requires maturity and acceptance of the vast array of emotions and meanings that do exist (in the Gilles Deleuze sense of the virtual). Much of these meanings we will never understand. Reactionary stances are about trying to manipulate other people to conform to our understanding, rather than expanding our own understandings.
5. Conclusion
Social media in the 21st century is an emotional interface just as 1960s counterculture united a generation emotionally and ideologically.
Our ability to interact provides an opportunity to coordinate and unify or to reject and fragment.
The issue for today is that often, with an ideology, adopting identity seems to necessitate the rejection of others, even if those others are not actually how we think they are.
In that sense, our lack of emotional management skills often leads us to demonize people for the purposes of feeling safe or feeling valid. Doubling down on ideology can feel good even while it can cause chaos in the online commons. Trolling, flaming, and virtue signaling leads many of us to treat others as our unwanted feelings. By placing others on the side of shame and rejection, the self can place ourselves on the side of pride and righteous acceptance. Radical rejection pollutes our shared emotional environment by fragmenting it so that each echo chamber centers on why they are right and everyone else is wrong. This creates hostility over issues that are otherwise tangental to our lived lives.
Information technology’s wide spread of information also doesn’t help as much of the outrage comes from people being unable to manage emotions in the face of an uncertain future. The more uncertain they are, the more reactionary they can be.
People may be scared that their rights are taken away. People may be scared that their culture is being diluted. People may be scared that they may be made irrelevant due to economics, immigration, a loss of privilege or whatever invalidation of the category they identify with.
Essentially, organizing your emotions around a framework that requires a central category to be in place. Loss of that concretized category could mean exposure to all the unwanted feelings held at bay by that ideology.
I often remind myself that the world is as it always was, regardless of what I may think or what things could mean. In that sense, adopting a post-structural world view doesn’t entail the loss of meaning. Ideally, we should see meaning as multivalent in order to recognize when ideas are inappropriate for a given situation, so we can make them work for ourselves and others whenever possible. But of course, methods that manipulate meaning can also destroy valid meanings and belittle ideologies that we think compete with what we want our world to feel like.
After all, the gap between reality and language always avails the possibility of insisting on favorite meanings despite whatever may be happening around us.
My hope with this essay is that this view of media, human sensemaking, and emotion is rich enough and convincing enough for you to adopt a wider range of possibility, whatever your choice of method, so that you can see what remains the same even as meanings can be different. Once we recognize anchors used to stabilize meaning, we can then begin the difficult process of deciding where we actually stand without those anchors.
None of this guarantees that people will ever cooperate, or that cooperation is always possible. If anything it can give us the option of finding a way, if that is what we want to do.
Ironically, people only claim to adopt their worldview because it is real. The fact is people do not adopt ideologies solely because of the truth value of the ideology. Ideologies, for many, are a stopgap to help us deal with absurdity and existentialism. Ideologies give people a good to fight for, or an evil to fight against. We adopt ideologies because such views help us understand who we are, what we are about, and help us deal with our emotions. In that sense, ideologies have meaning even if they are inaccurate.
People desire connection — but only if that connection can provide them coherency and belonging.
With this, we can see that not all ideologies are equal. Some ideologies lead its believers to become alienated from others simply for the comfort that ideology can provide them. These worldviews, like that of incels or flat-earthers, are among the most dangerous kind of ideology available. Such an ideology cannot allow greater coordination of society (coherency and belonging), as it limits the understandings people can have of what/who is valid. Such an ideology damages a society’s ability to adapt to the challenges we all collectively face today because of the belief of that ideology’s truth forbids real possibilities for connection and competence.
Yet the rejection of that ideology is not the right response if it entails the rejection of other people. Blocking those people may get them out of our attention but they will still be walking around and influencing others. The solution for society also isn’t to kill or exile anyone who doesn’t fit, as the planet isn’t big enough for such exclusions, nor will it forestall future objections.
If we cannot address why some choose a fragmentary ideology, real or not then we will be unable to address that ideology’s appeal. Only by having a bigger frame that incorporates that appeal can fragmenting ideologies be neutralized for others and ourselves.
This is also why authenticity matters in communication. Without it, there is less chance of actually finding common ground to bridge different worldviews.
For your amusement, I will end on this bit of emotional and identity manipulation as such concepts are central to forming community.
If you think this essay insightful, provocative or thoughtful, give a clap, or a share or two. Feedback is welcome.
