Ideology, Categories, and Radical Nominalism: What's in a Name, Besides Everything? Part 1
Unfortunately, as the US economy has transitioned from being an Agro-Industrial producer, into that of a Post Industrial economy of consumers, employed in the "Information Age", or Alvin Toffler's "Fourth Wave", there has been an alarming trend. That is, a general erosion of our powers of judgement, as increasingly our economic views are shaped by short term thinking, and the need for instant gratification. For many Boomers, influenced by the Existentialists, History begins the day we are born, and ends the day we die, and what is before or after is...nothingness. Heidegger described this as "throwness", the idea that Humankind doesn't control its destiny but we are thrown into this world against our will, and our lifetime path is determined by random interaction.
This thinking influenced many of us Boomers, and we transmitted it to the next generation. Again, not everyone consciously adopted this view, but we were surrounded by it, and the effect on our society has been that of moral and cognitive attrition.
One side of this attrition has been an increasing factor of object fixation, fetishism, and the obsession with appearance. Our thinking has become less conceptual, less interested in dynamics and processes, and more focused on statistics, "facts" data, and categorization based on the names assigned to something. The realm of ideas, and hypothesis has faded in the face of data and information. The result has been a form of radical nominalism, in which reality is defined by the parsing of meaning of words, and the assignment of people and associations into categories, based on the names associated with them. This labeling is precisely the point at which thinking stops, and programming begins.
So, currently our Nation is paralyzed and floundering because of the inability of our people to conceptualize the future, to organize themselves on behalf of the "General Welfare" as posed by Americas Framers, or to think in economic terms appropriate to that future. We are preoccupied with Money. We adopt an identity which is "Left" or "Right", or "Centrist", "Capitalist or Socialist", Communist or Nationalist. We adopt Gender identities, Racial and Ethnic Identities, and assign names and categories for each. Am I Metrosexual, or Demisexual, am I Liberal or Conservative, an Immigrant or a Refugee, etc? Most of these names and categories are either gibberish, or reflect a tragic degree of victimization which has the effect of atomizing our society and alienating our young people. We build in fratricidal political conflict, but we call it "diversity and pluralism" at work. And this we call "Democracy". But is it?
Think of how advertising works. Think about what we know about "Madison Avenue" how fashion trends and musical tastes etc are culturally engineered by large corporations, who hire marketing experts, demographic experts, who literally tell us from year to year what and who is popular, or not.
Politics is shaped in the same way. Our perceptions are managed, our candidates handpicked, and our policies brewed in back rooms by pollsters and focus groups.
Much of what we think we believe has been designed for us, and they package it as an Ideology, with a name, in a category, carried aloft like a banner which we march behind into the abyss.
That is the context for the mostly inane and counterproductive discussion about Bernie Sanders being a "Socialist", and whether that is good or not. I have more to say on this in Part 2
