Category: Ideology

We discussed Communism recently, which is one type of left wing belief.

I would suggest that the left’s core belief is:

Everyone should have a good life and society should work to make that happen.

What different left ideologies are arguing about his the means more than the end. A Communist believes the only way for this to be achieved is for the proletariat to control the means of production. (This makes them effectively the left oppositional image of capitalists.)

I, personally, want everyone to have enough and be happy. I recognize that the second is impossible: but it’s a guiding principle. However, at least since the 20th century it’s been more than possible for everyone to have enough food, water, shelter and medicine. We produce or can produce more than enough of all of them (especially food). We simply choose not to distribute to everyone because our current main economic  ideology says that if you don’t have enough money you don’t deserve anything.

In the modern world there are three main ideological groupings. Broadly the right, the left, and liberals/neoliberals. These don’t appear on a line, they’re a triangle and each has something in common with the others. The left, generally speaking, is anti-war, for example, and so are parts of the right, especially paleocons. Liberals are very identity politics focused and the left has sympathy for that, but isn’t as dedicated to it. The left’s primary focus is on economic issues and relationships and the relationship to IP is more of “of course everyone should be treated equally.”

The left’s argument about IP is that is splits coalitions when taken to extremes like micro-aggression hunting and reeducation for everyone because everyone’s racist and sexist. Liberals IP, on the other hands, is along the lines of “of course women and minorities should be able to become CEOs and President!”

Neoliberals, the dominant sub-ideology of liberalism believe in regulated markets intended to funnel money towards market winners and to keeping the mass of the population from making long term real wage gains. That’s why, over time, they’ve lost the support of the working class. Democrats were left wing under FDR, a coalition of left and liberals (not neoliberals) from 44 to 79, and have been neoliberal controlled ever since.

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Neoliberalism is in direct opposition to most strains for left-wing ideology. All may not be as extreme in their distrust of concentrations of wealth and capital as communism, but all believe that you can’t take care of everyone if the rich are too powerful. FDR had 90% top marginal tax rates for a reason and estate taxes under post-war British governments were absolutely punitive, but didn’t break up the great Ducal estates, alas.

We’ll discuss conservatives at a later time, but the general orientation is towards authoritarian identity. The left emphasizes horizontal ties, conservatives emphasize primitive identity (religion and culture) mediated through vertical ties. Ruler, nobles, rich, church. Nation and race and ethnicity. (The exception is theoretically libertarians, but they’re completely marginal.) The NASA mission to the moon was about many people’s contribution. Admirers of SpaceX give all credit to Elon Musk, who’s hasn’t engineered or built anything on his rockets.

Liberals are the great apostles of capitalism, not conservatives, though they like the way capitalism stratifies society. Left wingers are the opposition to capitalism. The most extreme versions want an end to it entirely, the moderate versions want it under firm control, made to contribute to mass prosperity, not turned to produce billionaires.

And, again, this is because what the left wants everyone prosperous, not a highly stratifed society, where a stratified society is a goal both liberals and conservatives share.

In my article on the rise and fall of credential systems and the Medieval University System, I mentioned that universities create culture. Standardized culture, as a rule. There was a fair bit of confusion around what culture creation is, so let’s talk about that.

To start, note that what you’re reading right now is culture creation: ideas about how the world works, or should work. I’m amplifying, as it happens, an academic, Randall Collins, though a lot of my work isn’t primarily based on academic literature, this is.  But if I’m writing about Israel, say, and the Gaza genocide, that’s culture production: that’s me amplifying and on rare occasions expanding on all those in the past who have said “genocide is bad” or “Zionism is based on ethnic cleansing, terrorism and apartheid.”

When I write about the ideology, or about surveillance is bad or climate change, it’s all culture production. It’s intended to explain how the world is or ought to be.

Schools and the especially the first parts of higher education, like BAs and Bachelors of science or engineering produce pretty standardized culture: there aren’t that many different standard textbooks for each field and virtually all academic disciplines have a consensus worldview of how things are and how they should be, and that’s what they teach. At higher levels, some disciplines let some doubt in, but at lower levels what you’re getting is pretty much the same as everyone else.

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Over time that consensus changes, of course, but it is a matter of “over time” and major paradigm breaks aren’t all that common.

It may seem weird to include science and engineering, but they also have consensus ways of thinking and organizing the world and those ways, too, change over time.

The Medieval Universities produced lawyers, doctors, theologians and administators. People who had a common view of the world. Of course there were some disputes, but they were much more similar to each other than to, say, the humanists who later replaced them.

The great ideologues produce new cultural projects: new understandings. Confucius produced administrators: he knew that’s what he was doing, that was his intention. He wanted to change China, and the way he chose was to try and make the best ministers. He built on top of a view of society as family. The Legalists, his main opposition, did much the same but with the idea of a ruthless state and complete obedience to the ruler, and the Mohists, though more revolutionary in mind, also trained administrators, but wanted far more equality

Islam is famed for its legalism, and what is law but “how things should be?”

The Philosophes were, likewise, engaged in a project of creating an understanding of “what should be.”

So was Jesus, so was Marx and so was Adam Smith.

But those are the high points, for every great ideologue there are millions of small ones. And yeah, a lot of podcasts fall under the rubric of culture creation, including some of the biggest ones. Joe Rogan qualifies, for sure. Talk radio usually qualifies, and Rush Limbaugh was one of the most important ideologues of the past forty years.

Technology (which is part of culture); natural constraints like geography, climate and biology; and ideology in the sense, again of “what we believe is and should be” are the most important parts of what creates human reality. Culture creation matters and it’s dirt common. Without all the little creators taking up their work, the big ones wouldn’t be big.