Beyond Belief

Politics and ideology ensnare like religion, offering oversimplistic answers that deceive with comfortable hiding places of narcotic self-satisfaction. Instead of a priest dressed in holy robes telling you tall tales and evasively complicated explanations for why things are failing (but will soon be great, very soon, very great -- keep waiting and paying and following) a politician or pundit justifier gains control by getting others to defer to their special vision of what society should be, as if shaping from the outside could produce a positive result.

All such schemes have so far led to decline, degradation, meaninglessness, and misery, but the leader's trivial twist on things is promoted as though it should somehow be expected to revive the whole from the impairment and indignity caused by all who came before and attempted to improve the organic.

Under this approach, people are universally assumed to be barn animals, as some surely are, incapable of gaining self-awareness, and thus in need of imposed order and false explanations to feel a sense of direction and purpose. This perversity gets a foothold because failure and disaster are rarely recognized until decades after their consequences are already established.

The inclination of the political and ideological approach is to keep piling on faster than people can unpile, leaving people unable to defend against the consequences of imposed politics and ideology. Multiple politics and ideology independently aspire to pile on, each offering to defend against the others, with none offering relief from the encroachment in general.

Some seek a solution by pledging religious loyalty to a political party, and lose notice of the real world so they can remain obedient and supportive of their chosen belief. Others give in from overload, accepting the discourse as legitimate and tolerating this encirclement by the many sides who use this technique against the public.

In professional wrestling entertainment, a character usually plays the face (hero) or heel (villain). Religion, politics, and ideology recruit and maintain believers by offering their hero product and positioning pseudo-opponents as villain characters to cheer against. All whom cheer for their hero are deemed good, while competing figured are considered wrong, ignorant, hateful, unenlightened, bigoted, and probably enemies plotting to salt the earth under the cover of night.

To hold these beliefs requires no understanding of them, nor awareness of the larger struggle of bellum omnium contra omnes, but merely a core orientation of opposition to others. The ideological enemy is strong, but our true faith will prevail, the wicked will be punished, God will guide us to victory, and the world will be ours! So say all sides against one another.

As popular opinion is rarely near any basic truth, the likely winner of these protracted skirmishes can be expected to espouse fallacious ideas, yet be supremely confident of their position and demonstrably capable of inspiring a large group of followers. The foundation of their ideology needs no relation to any cause or effect, and thus cannot be disproven -- it is immune to reason, debunking, and critique, all techniques in any case that only the wicked would attempt to use against the righteous. And even that is too much work and misses the point, as presumptuous assertions suffice for appeal to acolytes.

We get many political movements, ideologies, and religions, all badly missing the mark of sane diagnostics, stability, or pragmatic fixes, because their goal is to attract followers and gain power, not to solve problems or address reality. They are not judged on results. They say what a demographic wants to hear, provoke followers to become agents of the power brokers, and then put on a dramatic show to solidify the base and attract new believers.

The pragmatic test in assessing politics or ideology is to measure what is fixed (not merely moved around, hidden, stolen from others, or buried elsewhere), what is made worse, and what was ignored. Was there a single idea in contact with the real world, or was it all sensationalism designed to manipulate the irrational majority?

Accordingly, we dismiss all modern politics and ideology as a religion that attempts to appear normal but at its core is still hunting new witches to blame and murder, under the premise that our problems can be solved if only we could eliminate the evil effect of invisible witches that leaders with bold vision are able to detect.