It could be interpreted as pointing out the strength of standard background ideology. Having my older relatives explain how seriously basically everyone under a certain age took communism was really eye opening to me as a teen. Even more odd was how only the elderly pointed out that the current system too may pass someday, and that it isn’t wise to personally attach oneself to it to much, while some of my younger relatives (still old enough to grow up in communism!) seem to assume that this time it really is the “end of history”.
Societies used to have a background religion no one even considered to question, and those people who did kept really quiet about it, many still do, this is why we have countries that are say 97%+ Muslim. But nearly all societies still have a background ideological foundations on which everyone agrees.
The ideological foundations always reinforce existing dominant power structures, even if it perhaps dosen’t paint the positions it is supporting as dominant. Counter-revolutionaries and wreckers are needed to explain failure after all. You see our society dosen’t suck because its ideals are impractical or flawed, it sucks because we don’t live up to them enough, and are prevented to do so by those nasty people who still have too much power, though they are so clever about it that we can’t really say how they do it. We are still struggling for a [adjective] society but aren’t you glad you now have us on your side?
I still get goose bumps realizing just how much my world view may be deformed by the current social order that I’ve internalized.
It could be interpreted as pointing out the strength of standard background ideology. Having my older relatives explain how seriously basically everyone under a certain age took communism was really eye opening to me as a teen. Even more odd was how only the elderly pointed out that the current system too may pass someday, and that it isn’t wise to personally attach oneself to it to much, while some of my younger relatives (still old enough to grow up in communism!) seem to assume that this time it really is the “end of history”.
Societies used to have a background religion no one even considered to question, and those people who did kept really quiet about it, many still do, this is why we have countries that are say 97%+ Muslim. But nearly all societies still have a background ideological foundations on which everyone agrees.
The ideological foundations always reinforce existing dominant power structures, even if it perhaps dosen’t paint the positions it is supporting as dominant. Counter-revolutionaries and wreckers are needed to explain failure after all. You see our society dosen’t suck because its ideals are impractical or flawed, it sucks because we don’t live up to them enough, and are prevented to do so by those nasty people who still have too much power, though they are so clever about it that we can’t really say how they do it. We are still struggling for a [adjective] society but aren’t you glad you now have us on your side?
I still get goose bumps realizing just how much my world view may be deformed by the current social order that I’ve internalized.