Ideology is not for arguing or justifying. It is for living.

>>402
A forum is an ideological thunderdome in which we can train the martial art of ideology.

This is easily misinterpreted without reference to content or application. The first heresy in the way of ideology is the idea that ideology is for arguing. If ideology is about arguing, then a thunderdome will get us plenty good at that, and the slipperiest shall survive. We can add speechmaking and formal debate and get very good indeed. But this is just rhetoric, and rhetoric is only part of the art of ideology.

In the crudest American discourse usage, an ideology is an online social posture that cheers for this or that in the culture war spectacle. For example, you might have an ideology that says technological progress is good, or that equality is bad. See especially "meme ideologies".

In the more sophisticated Marxist concept, ideology is the framework of justification that is used to defend a particular material power structure. For example, capitalism has economics, and the health care industry has the veneration of doctors, belief in the power of medicine, and a commitment to prolonging life. This is a good start, but implies too much cynicism and a lack of causal potency of ideology itself. It does not explain why ideology has the power to justify.

In a fuller (Sofist?) sense, an ideology is a system of beliefs, norms, values, and practices that animates a particular material system of power and life. A religious community like the Mormons or Amish have a whole way of thinking that animates their way of life. That is their ideology. Companies have internal ideologies about what to pursue, why, and how. Human cultures have ideology, usually implicit, that define their most cherished ideals and ontological assumptions. Ideology is the conceptual structure of a self-organized living system.

Ideology can be trotted out to justify something or used as a meme posture in the online culture wars because of this more fundamental power to structure life. Ideology is an operating system for a material form of life. Ideology is not for arguing, but for living.

Arguments are useful insofar as they clarify and improve our ideologies. You and I might get into a flame war about the value of American hegemony for example. The point of this is not to represent teams or justify or blame anything, but to clarify our own relationship to the subject and how we should believe and act in our personal and political lives. Should we believe the empire when it tells us that its interest is our interest? If not, how should we understand our position in it? These are ideological questions of some importance. Our objective in arguing is to actually figure out a good answer.

I don't use the term "martial art" of ideology lightly. Your answers to ideological questions have economic, political, and even military implication. You have adversaries who may be more skilled than you. There are hundreds of state and non-state actors with strong incentives to convince you by any means necessary of their own ideas of what your ideology should be. If you are bad at it, you will lose this information war and live at someone else's mercy. You will believe and value what they want you to, whether or not it is actually good for you. You will become a slave.

On the other hand if you are good at the martial art of ideology, you will be able to defend yourself. You will have ideological security and will not be easily misled by false tales of value. You will build an ideology that serves your own interests and those of your friends. You will become powerful.

The point of the art, whatever we call it, is not to win arguments, but to win at life. It is to find the ways of thriving life, and hold them against lies, stupidity, confusion, and hostile interests.

What does it mean to win at life? That's part of the problem statement; you need to get good at figuring out what is best in life.

>But for the emphasis on material systems, to the then presumed exclusion of the supra/non-material, this reads akin to the ancient meaning of _religio_ [0]:

Yes. I basically am talking about religio, but through a materialist lens. I think and extremist materialism is occasionally necessary in philosophical history, and now is one such moment. But materialism has many different meanings. I *don't* mean the dogma that everything is made of mechanistic matter or that the spiritual is fake or nonexistent. I will have to articulate what kind of materialism I do advocate.

The quick version is that materialism is the discipline to examine states of the world, of arrangement of flows of matter, energy, and information, of the practical matter of what and how, instead of examining the symbols. The place this matters most is in noticing that the "ideologies" that people traffic in on the internet are not operating systems for life, but basically just primitive colored totems within the internet poster way of life.

>Is "ideology" just secular religio?

No. In particular, it is not necessarily secular. Many ideologies invoke gods, the transcendent, and the supernatural. In fact I'd say all honest ones acknowledge the essentially magical/metaphysical grounding they stand on. Again, materialism isn't secularism. It is an analytic/strategic commitment to may attention to form and substance rather than symbol.

>>447

>When you put it that way, it's striking how much a gaping void this is.

Exactly. It's crucial.

>"defense against ideology" is arguably more valuable than a positive ideology itself.

Defense on behalf of what, though? Leave that gaping void open, and your defense is not complete, besides there being nothing to defend. Deep sea robotics don't depend just on seals; they fill their gaping voids with their own high pressure oil to push back against seawater incursion.

>It does not explain why ideology has the power to justify.
While not always explicated, some marxists attempt to explain this by going through psychoanalysis. Ideology has the power to justify because it in part defines who we are and what the world is to us as conscious beings that have to parse it out through mostly symbolic representations.

Althusser also makes the explicit connection between ideology and religion - religion, as an ideology, animates us because it defines us, just like a set of code can define what a particular function does, and just like how a function is called by its name and gets used in a larger program for a certain goal, so does naming someone place them into a symbolic structure where they act towards certain ends according to their definition.

>As the formal structure of all ideology is always the same, I shall restrict my analysis to a single example, one accessible to everyone, that of religious ideology, with the proviso that the same demonstration can be produced for ethical, legal, political, aesthetic ideology, etc.
>Let us therefore consider the Christian religious ideology. I shall use a rhetorical figure and ‘make it speak’, i.e. collect into a fictional discourse what it ‘says’ not only in its two Testaments, its Theologians, Sermons, but also in its practices, its rituals, its ceremonies and its sacraments. The Christian religious ideology says something like this:
>It says: I address myself to you, a human individual called Peter (every individual is called by his name, in the passive sense, it is never he who provides his own name), in order to tell you that God exists and that you are answer able to Him. It adds: God addresses himself to you through my voice (Scripture having collected the Word of God, Tradition having transmitted it, Papal Infallibility fixing it for ever on ‘nice’ points). It says: this is who you are: you are Peter! This is your origin, you were created by God for all eternity, although you were born in the 1920th year of Our Lord! This is your place in the world! This is what you must do! By these means, if you observe the ‘law of love’ you will be saved, you, Peter, and will become part of the Glorious Body of Christ! Etc....
>Now this is quite a familiar and banal discourse, but at the same time quite a surprising one.
>Surprising because if we consider that religious ideology is indeed addressed to individuals,[19] in order to ‘transform them into subjects’, by interpellating the individual, Peter, in order to make him a subject, free to obey or disobey the appeal, i.e. God’s commandments; if it calls these individuals by their names, thus recognizing that they are always-already interpellated as subjects with a personal identity (to the extent that Pascal’s Christ says: ‘It is for you that I have shed this drop of my blood!’); if it interpellates them in such a way that the subject responds: ‘Yes, it really is me!’ if it obtains from them the recognition that they really do occupy the place it designates for them as theirs in the world, a fixed residence: ‘It really is me, I am here, a worker, a boss or a soldier!’ in this vale of tears; if it obtains from them the recognition of a destination (eternal life or damnation) according to the respect or contempt they show to ‘God’s Commandments’, Law become Love; – if everything does happen in this way (in the practices of the well-known rituals of baptism, confirmation, communion, confession and extreme unction, etc. ...), we should note that all this ‘procedure’ to set up Christian religious subjects is dominated by a strange phenomenon: the fact that there can only be such a multitude of possible religious subjects on the absolute condition that there is a Unique, Absolute, Other Subject, i.e. God.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm

>>451
>Ideology has the power to justify because it in part defines who we are and what the world is to us as conscious beings that have to parse it out through mostly symbolic representations.

Right. It's the way we actually organize our own lives and sensemaking.

Glad to hear the smart marxists get it.

Reading this I'm realizing that some time recently I've moved from the bottleneck being ideological to the bottleneck being practical, and while I like the idea here it's very programmatic. I wanna see concreteness. This post on its own is, in your sense of it, not very material (practical? concrete? teleological?) and fairly symbolic. Where do we go from here?

>>454
Yes! Practicalities are indeed the next step. In fact I think I'll start a thread on materialism and the practical bottleneck. I do think it's important to work through the logic carefully even if it self-refutes on its way to our destination (practicalities).

man from an ironically symbolic standpoint, while i get what you're getting at with "materialism," i'd hate to call it that because i find ontological materialism like LW's reductive materialism to be pretty disgusting. it has connotations of sitting on your thumb and imagining quantum fields instead of actually facing the world (see the self-parody in the "reductionism" chapter of hpmor), versus what we wamt which is a practically turning towards what is actually there before us and the concretely practical

>>458

heh. Call it what you will, it's the orientation itself that matters. "materialism" is as good a name as any, and perhaps the irony of "materialism" often being a sort of pointless symbolic-ontological pedantry is part of the joke.

>a practically turning towards what is actually there before us

I can smell the Heidegger from here.

>>460
>I can smell the Heidegger from here.
u got me