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| image is from here |
The above image states, "To take over the world, all you need is an idea." This is far from the truth. There are many ideas roaming around, and only some take root. The ones that take root do so for many reasons--and the fact that the idea is "an idea" is the least of them. How an idea fits with existing systems of thought and action, with existing patterns of oppression, domination, and dehumanisation, will dictate a lot about the course it takes toward being a "movement" or a new form of doing civilisation. For example, Adolph Hitler's ideas were not new and were not his. He borrowed heavily from the anti-Semitism of the Weimar Republic in which he grew up, but crystalised those ideas with a new one: an actual plan to eliminate Jews from the European population. They way he and his cronies figured out how to do it--not just in ideas, but in very forceful social actions--was new for the time.
After some exchange with Hank Pellissier over at his place (I link to his place a couple of times below), I realised, once again, there is a strange belief among many ruling class people (not necessarily Hank, however) that they are capable of doing something that no one can do: observe the world objectively, as if not from a vantage-point or social station or political location that exists relative to other classes of people, as well as other individuals.
We generally understand that the rich hold such positions, socially, politically, and certainly economically. Although the mythologies do insist that the rich are constantly threatened by the greed of the poor, as opposed to the truth of the matter: the poor are constantly threatened by the greed of the rich.
Whether men in the gender class, whites in the race class, hets in the sexual class, or the rich and wealthy in the economic class, that those of us who are not stationed structurally with men's, whites', hets', and the rich's privileges (to not experience what the oppressed experience), power (including the power to name reality as if being objective), and entitlements (to have access to most of the world, and to hold oneself in accordance with how one's own people are held by the elite, such as with a sense of moral superiority, greater intelligence, finer appreciation of what's important in life, belief in the civility of civilisation, and so on.)
This is an example of current CRAP-loaded hideology:
1. "Men are smarter than women, usuallly." Hideology holds these secret and not-so-secret beliefs: when a woman is smarter than a man, then we must say things like "she's smart, but ALSO attractive" as if the former quality rules out the latter, and as if we must always be reminded that a woman's job, after all, at the end of each day and at the break of dawn, is to be pretty in ways that please the het doods who punish women both for being pretty and for not being pretty. Men are so smart, in fact, that when they coerce women to have genital sexual intercourse, the men never call it rape and also never take responsibility for the woman getting pregnant, if she does. And they want to plead complete innocence--as if the woman took the man's penis and placed it, against his will, into her body--when it comes time to pay something called "child support".
2. "Whites are more moral than people who are not white." Hideology holds these viewpoints not spoken out loud in polite white society: Black people are dangerous. Except Oprah Winfrey and Bill Cosby. Brown people are also dangerous, and do things like sneak across "our" border and steal all our jobs. Indigenous people... well, whites usually ignore Indigenous people altogether, in many parts of the U.S. Oh, except white het men who trespass onto res land and rape Indigenous women and girls, comprising the largest demographic of rapists of Indigenous females (at least 80% of the men who rape Native women are white). There are odd twists and turns when it comes to understanding "Asians". On the one hand there are those "smart" East Asians. And on the other hand those terroristic Central Asians. But whites don't refer to them as being people in Central Asia, because whites don't understand geography very well.
3. "Heterosexuality is natural and normal and all the other sexual orientations exists because something went wrong during pregnancy or during upbringing, such as being molested when young." This viewpoint is held despite the fact that the most sexually assaulted people on Earth are heterosexual women, who are incested, molested, raped, pimped, turned into pornography, and trafficked by heterosexual men.
4. "The rich are good. Very good, in fact. Great, even." They must be good and great because they are rich. Society won't let just anyone become rich, you know! When the rich have children, they are planned, well-cared for, and well-educated. When the poor have children, they are never planned, are either abused or neglected, and are not well-educated.
I'll tell you a secret: one of the saddest stories of childhood is from a white gay man I knew who grew up very rich, on an estate, raised not by his parents--who were both irresponsible alcoholics--but instead by people hired to raise their child. He was a very lonely child, and felt very unloved and neglected by his parents.
If I tell one of these race- and class-privileged people that a child was neglected and also poor, those who buy into the hideology will nod a knowing condescending nod which means, "Well, what can you expect, really? Poor people don't know how to raise children; they only have them to get more money from the government, you know?" When I tell them a story like the one above, about the white gay man, they insist that's an aberration; an exception to the rule.
Hideology is leaking out all over the place in a discussion, with over one thousand comments, mind you, at Hank Pellissier's place. Here is the link to that:
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/pellissier20110420
I've posted about that discussion *here*.
To bolster a belief that their ideas aren't ideological--let alone rigidly so--they cherry pick from studies done within a form of inquiry that many of its practitioners insist values "objectivity": namely science. Hank is way into science, as white Anglo-Euro men define the term. And as is the case with most who invest in this objectivity-nonsense, he and his colleagues only choose the information that shores up the positions neatly cloaking their hideology. Again, I'm not sure Hank is as guilty of this as many of his followers are. Among his followers are some pretty scary individuals, almost all of them VERY privileged people, structurally.
A disagreement between the likes of me and the likes of some elitist pro-science libertarians is that they think I make too many determinations about someone based on things like "identity", which means, to them: someone's gender, race, sexual orientation, or economic class.
It's not exactly determinations they dislike, but me making generalised class-based critiques of members of these privileged groups, so that their sense of themselves as "only individuals" (accepting they are also the products of their genes), is insulted. They feel degraded when put into a box called "them". But they are quite comfortable to discuss other "thems" who are not, um, them who are white het class-privileged men.
They think I over-determine people's personalities and values only if I view what the privileged do (because they are privileged, not because they are male humans, for example) with critique and condemnation. I criticise and call out inhumane actions and affiliations, prejudices and practices. I don't imbue being pale with a meaning; I claim society does this, and calls paleness "whiteness" and that whiteness is therefore not at all a biological or "scientific" category, but is, rather, only a social-cultural-political reality. And so the behavior of whites can be traced, followed, tracked. Whites do tend to leave quite the trail of blood behind them, after all. Primarily of Indigenous people's blood, but not only that. Whites do also attempt to kill of anyone who is Black or Brown, in many despicable ways. And whites do, on occasion, war against other whites, enslave other whites, but usually when they do this they view those "other whites" as somehow "another ethnic group" such as, say, "Irish"--if the whites are English, for example.
They defend themselves--in their manhood, whiteness, hetness, and wealth, as "only individuals" who are capable of both good and bad, while they speak about other people in very simplistic and stereotypical ways, such as in statements that reveal they think of poor people as "miscreants", for example. (Are rich people not usually "miscreants", then?)
To be fair to Hank, he's not so neatly categorisable in terms of, say, his views about women. Men's Rights guys hate him so he's got to be doing some good work in making them expose both their vulnerabilities and ugliness. Those neo-fascistic woman-hating fools accuse him of being all the hateful things MRAs accuse any "traitor males" of being. (I'll spare you the list of terms and phrases.) He tends to see humans in terms of things like genes and hormones, however. Not as humans-in-social-systems that shape our brains and our behavior--as well as our genes, health, and lifespan. His views, at times, approximate the views of a very tiny minority of women I know: that men are naturally the way they are. I disagree with any women or men who hold this view, although I concede that far too many men around the world make a compelling case that there must be something about being "male" that leads them to act like masculinist dickheads.
See, for example, this post by him on the end of men:
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/pellissier20110202
Hank and I may find some common ground, but it won't be in believing men are naturally anything, other than perhaps, in most but not all instances, naturally "male".
