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SCHOLAR ISLAND |
Ideology
"Ideology….is an instrument of power; a defense mechanism against information; a pretext for eluding moral constraints in doing or approving evil with a clean conscience; and finally, a way of banning the criterion of experience, that is, of completely eliminating or indefinitely postponing the pragmatic criterion of success and failure."
Jean-Francois Revel
"Our blight is ideologies-they are the long-expected Antichrist!"
-Carl Jung
"General and abstract ideas are the greatest errors of mankind."
-Jean Jacques Rousseau
" Roughly defined, an ideologist is a thinker convinced he has discovered clear solutions to certain human problems or predicaments-solutions capable of expression in general theoretical terms."
Karl Jaspers
The Origin and Goal of History
"Ideologies arise when people feel they have no real somatic anchoring. The person who is truly grounded in him-or herself as a biological organism may espouse a cause, but they do not need it in order to feel that their existence is validated. God and country, feminism and sexism, Judaism and anti-Semitism, the religious fundamentalism of Bible Belt Baptists and the self-conscious intellectualism of the New York Review of Books-any ism you care to name, really-are all attempts to create meaning for human beings who, if they had not suffered some sort of primary loss early on, would not need it. For the (extremely rare) healthy person, life is its own meaning; they do not need an ism to stuff the gap, to feel OK. In our society, however, isms and ideologies are as widespread, and as addictive, as any drug one can think of."
Morris Berman
Coming To Our Senses
" An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation, evasion, in some sense or other to his advantage.:
Karl Jaspers
The Origin and Goal of History
"Ideology, like theater, is dependent on the willing suspension of disbelief. At the core of every ideology lies the worship of a bright new future, with only failure in the immediate past."
John Ralston Saul
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West"
"Roughly defined, an ideologist is a thinker convinced he has discovered clear solutions to certain human problems or predicaments-solutions capable of expression in general theoretical terms."
Times Literary Supplement (London)
(Jan 29 ,1970)
"No one is more Tedious than the Totally ideologized man, the men who forces every passing phenomenon into his ideological mold."
-W.F. Buckley
"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."
H.L. Mencken
“That ideology is a phenomenon of intellectual dishonesty is beyond a doubt, because the various ideologies after all have been submitted to criticism, and anybody who is willing to read the literature knows that they are not tenable, and why….I still maintain today that nobody who is an ideologist can be a competent social scientist.”
Eric Voegellin
Autobiographical Reflections
…And here comes in my particular hatred of ideologists because they vulgarize the intellectual debate and give to public discussion the distinctly ochlocratic coloring that today has reached the point of considering as fascist or authoritarian even a reference to the facts of political and intellectual history that must be known if one wants to discuss the problems that come up in political debate. The radical condemnation of historical and philosophical knowledge must be recognized as an important factor in the social environment because it is dominated by persons who cannot even be called intellectual crooks because their level of consciousness is much too low to be aware of their objective crookedness, but must rather be characterized as functional illiterates with a strong desire for personal aggrandizement.
Eric Voegellin
ibid***************
Book: "A World Of Ideas: A Dictionary of Important Theories, Concepts , Beliefs, and Thinkers" by Chris Rohmann
Book: "On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of ideology" by Michael Rosen
Book: "Indispensable Enemies" by Walter Karp
Book: "A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles" by Thomas Sowell