Idealism
A religious ethos turned ideological doctrine favoured by atheist socialists. The operating system of modern progressivism and authoritarian regimes.
Purports to be a modest pursuit aimed at gradual societal improvements over time, yet somehow consistently fails to have the patience for such a thing every time it is conjured.
Idealism has undergone significant transformations after generations of philosophical examination. Its current incarnation finds its origins in German Idealism of the 18th and 19th centuries. At this time, thinkers like Georg Hegel maintained that while prevailing thinking perceived the world as a reflection of the mind, each of our minds exists as a sort of crystallized fragmentation of God, temporarily occupying space in our finite body. Over time, God was gradually removed from the equation and replaced with rationalism.
Even though transcendent objects are not effectively substituted with human reason, this renovation did not fundamentally change how the system operates. German idealists were enthusiastic about reform and revolution, and they employed linguistic and conceptual ambiguity on a regular basis. Irrespective of their intentions, this encouraged sophists and despots to interpret the mind however they see fit; the mind of God, after all, had been decidedly unknowable and inaccessible. When abstractions employing a dialectical model subject to individual interpretation are integrated into reality, they invite the ambitious to justify a monopoly on authority using nothing more than linguistic persuasion and manipulation. It is a methodology for capturing and maintaining control through the dictation and definition of knowledge.
This process has become so formalized that it is reliably employed to strategically subvert whole fields of inquiry by idealistic ACTIVISTS. It is a relatively straightforward process of divide and conquer. The thinking is that, if they can control the academic epistemology of a given field, they can shape the downstream social consciousness that is traditionally informed by institutional narratives. As fields continue to be subverted, one after another, the public will become sympathetic to grievance narratives and critical theoretical approaches, which primes them to become willing recipients of socialist ideology. Once leaders and elites, who have all been educated and trained by these institutions, are ready to implement policy that supports this agenda, they will usher in the utopia.
James Lindsey has outlined this process with impressive detail during the last few years to assist us with understanding its progression.
[First, it involves] the creation or invention of a realm that doesn’t exist so you can claim to be [uncontested] experts in a field…so you will be the only one who knows how to talk about it. “We have been thinking about it a long time, we are experts, you are not.”
The desire is to usurp the mantle of credibility and authority, to take it away from the people who currently have it because they have robust methodologies, and to put it in the hands of the party apparatus that has the correct ideology. Why? [It is based on the Hegelian idea, that they possess] ‘Vernunft’ or ‘reason,’ which is superior to ‘verstand’ – ‘understanding,’ which is the low-level understanding of scientists.
The essence of this position is that the ideology is more correct and more important than whatever is gleaned from studying nature and reality in an objective sense. For Hegel, capturing knowledge production was necessary, and this was best achieved by usurping the legitimacy and credibility of existing knowledge that interfered with gnostic positions. Ideological proficiency, which Hegel called ‘science,’ is the inversion of science, a tacit example of the redefinition words necessary to sabotage the existing stability of a culture.
Hegel claimed that this is justified because those who capture this power, people like him, are more deserving than anyone else to wield such a power, because others do not understand the abstractions and complexities underpinning their revolutionary precepts. Simply put, we are not smart enough, even though we can both follow and dissect his arguments with relative ease. We would be sorely lacking the ‘Vernunft’ required to understand what is really going on in the world. We do not have the ‘gnosis,’ the special revealed wisdom, or a ‘glimpse of the divine intellect,’ which is what ideologues believe they possess.
Once the prescribed realm has been established by this anointed class, they need to find a way to infiltrate a legitimate realm and glean credibility by proximity.
[Second, they need to] blur the boundaries of a field and expand it so it can include what they would like it to. [They will] expand terms to mean more than they would mean. This makes it confusing to everyone but the initiate class, them, who are the only ones who know what is going on. It includes who gets to decipher knowledge.
Idealism is generally unwelcome in legitimate realms of inquiry because they are predominantly focused on what might be true based on reliable models, not the construction of gnostic models that fail to predict anything useful. Once the edges of a field have been rendered fuzzy enough, they will introduce their pre-packaged epistemology alongside their insistence that they alone are capable of interpreting and dictating knowledge that flows forth from this novel position.
Lastly, they need to reposition themselves and their views as equally valid in the legitimate field in order to contend with established knowledge. This is done primarily by leveraging a model of equity, and then insisting that their positions are no less part of the central field once the reorganization has occurred.
[Third, they will] wedge in a way to give preferential treatment to the selected group. Excluding the old, including the Soviet. Moving what was centered out to the margins, and moving what was marginalized to the center. [It is] ideology being used to combat legitimate epistemologies by describing them as alternative ideologies…
It will claim the field is underexamined and thus needs their contortions to be considered legitimate. It will claim that [their] arbitrary and political ideologies are robust, or that they produce robust knowledge.
Once their glaring bias and self-interest is recognized, their defenses are ready-made, just like their ideology. They will claim that bias is already present in the field, and so they must introduce their own bias to combat it. This is Hegelian synthesis, which they will justify as necessary for progress in the field. The reality is that want control of the field.
They will then make appeals to academic purity, highlighting the gnostic nature of their positions. They will not deny that bias is bad, rather, they will defend their bias as being integrated consciously, and so it is being done responsibly. The rest of the field is unaware of their bias – it has been integrated unconsciously, and is therefore irresponsible. It is the field that is doing harm and they are not even aware of it, which they will argue indicates that the scientists do not understand their own field, they only have ‘verstand.’ They have not glimpsed the divine intellect like the initiate class. The field needs them, those with ‘Vernunft.’
To take over a field, go after the sociology and anthropology around a field, seize the means of production of the sociology around a field, [and then] use this as a justification to change the field. (1)
If you notice the similarities between this approach and Soviet-style Communism, it is because Hegelian dialectical materialism was used by Karl Marx to serve as the foundation for MARXISM. This form of German idealism has undergone another transformation recently, it is known as THE SCIENCE.
Idealists believe that if they trust that something is profoundly true with a sufficiently deep amount of conviction, then it is true, or can be manifest as real, because their reason is a glimpse of the divine intellect. The proliferation of these tactics is precisely what has stirred the creation of various specializations on college campuses designed to dupe our children and empty their bank accounts. It is occurring because otherwise useless intellectuals have found a niche they can exploit in an insulated realm so they can shape culture as a downstream effect of academic enrollment. This is being done intentionally, and reading literature authored by one or more critical theorists will clarify that this is by design.
Ironically, while many academics and students claim to abhor Hitler and the Nazis, these critical approaches, especially those furthered by Herbert Marcuse, have a lot in common with their desire to create a master race – an anointed class of purists equipped with a new sensibility that would innovate human biology and establish a utopian future. It is likely that they would deny any similarities.
Despite tens of millions of dead in more than a dozen countries at the hands of idealists, utopia has yet to be seen. The magic number must be closer to one billion.
(1) All excerpts are from New Discourses podcast, What Radicalized You, James Lindsay?, released on Dec 5, 2022.
Revised: 8 Mar 2023
