More Scattered Thoughts

Ideology freaks me out.

Its essentially what you believe without knowing. Slavoj Zizek puts it another way, defining it via a quote from Marx (in a sense putting words into Marx's mouth): "They do not know it, but they are doing it." And that creates a different conversation, too, about whether ideologies are primarily acted out or spoken out, because, of course, people don't always do what they say. I'm not the biggest Reza Aslan fan by any means, but I do think he's onto something when he says the way people act out their religions is more about what they bring and their culture brings than what the religion itself says. Same goes here. (But what makes a 'good' capitalist?)

Anyway, ideology...mostly freaks me out linguistically. What I mean is that when people decide to defend their ideology, they jump through all sorts of hoops to keep it. We have words for the various ways they do this. Confirmation bias, for example, describes when people take facts that support their view and leave aside the ones that don't. There are numerous logical fallacies used, mostly in assuming the antecedent and similar abuses: "I can ignore externalities, because left alone, the market will fix them."

I'm a fan of markets. You might even say I'm pro-market...anti-capitalist though. I think this would confuse most people. There are people who have a problem with 'capitalism' being used as a pejorative (see here and in its comments), and prefer things like 'free market' or 'free enterprise'. I find this a little hilarious and worrying, because this is that same ideological back bending I was speaking to. Rather than seeing that 'Capitalism' is being used as an alternate, pejorative term for 'free market', because it has a certain basis in actual criticisms of the marketplace, they perceive it--in typical fashion of the executive class--as a naming/marketing problem.

more later...I suppose...if I weren't busy writing awesome fictional things...