Tcobb,

You’re right that I’ve been using the word “ideology” loosely, and no doubt there are some kinds of “ideology” that I too would work against, and I would promote a way of thinking that is not about building great metaphysical systems. But nonetheless, I don’t really know how to distinguish “ideology” from cultural preferences more generally, in daily life.

I also agree that a lot of people who desire power, wealth, etc., are often not particularly good people. But why can they manipulate us if not for the fact that they manipulate something we all inevitably need – shared ideas and trust. Human society depends on common ethical understandings and how can anyone’s distinction of necessary culture and fraudulent ideology be itself anything but a politically charged claim. I mean, if everyone agreed that ideology x was a lie promoted by a con man, then the con man wouldn’t be getting anywhere and it wouldn’t be a problem. We are fooled because human society can’t function well without shared trust, and it can’t function well without some people taking the lead in saying, look, this is our present reality and we need to address this problem, this imperative, by building a new or renewed ethic or trust relationship. At the start, we can’t always know whether we are being led towards truth or astray. We can’t dismiss all would-be leaders or we’d be lost. The trick is to build systems where we are not dependent on any one man, where a regular circulation of people “going first” occurs and where there is a good balance of powers.

The way you are distinguishing “ideology” seems to be retrospective, in terms of what has already been shown to work and what not. But we can’t make that distinction easily when we’re in the middle of things because in daily life truth is always working on two levels: there are truths that speak to the most highly-differentiated consciousness of learned human self-knowledge, i.e. truths that appeal to an anthropological and historical consciousness; and then there are truths that are pragmatically proven, that get people to do things, for a time, even if on some more fundamental level the people are being motivated by a lie. If a little violence gets a job done, is it a lie? How much is a little? After all, we can’t fall for the Utopian lie of a totally non-violent world.

Thus, we might agree that “communism” was a lie, thanks to our historical perspective. But in its time, “communism” was achieving things in turning peasants into modern industrialists who could build high-tech weapons, etc. Thus, we must now look at the death toll of communism and call it a lie, while recognizing that it could not have been so obvious a lie, say in the 1940s, because it was keeping people working together and helping them defeat their outside enemies.

I may know a truth, but if in sharing it with you, it pisses you off (because you naturally resent someone telling you what’s what and making your insights secondary to my lecture), then I fail on the level of pragmatic truth for we fail to get things done together. If I tell you a lie that appeals to your vanity, and we manage to get something done together, then the observer must recognize a pragmatic truth about humanity in my lie, even if he has access to a more fundamental truth about how my “lie” “only” fools, but for a time. But then any truth is always less than the full truth which we can never grasp but only ever work towards.