William Irwin Thompson on Ideology
Discussion
William Irwin Thompson:
"Every politically-oriented intellectual searches for a new ideology, hoping to become another Marx for a better Lenin; but ideology is to the mind what excrement is to the body: the exhausted remains of once-living ideas.
2) The Truth cannot be expressed in an ideology, for Truth is the shared life that overlights the conflict of opposed ideologies, much in the same way that the Gaian atmosphere overlights the "conflict" of ocean and continent; therefore, the Truth cannot be "known" by the process of intellectual analysis, critique, or communicative rationality; nor can it be socially administered by a philosophical or religious elite of the best and the brightest, be they followers of Mohammed, Marx, Habermas, or E.O. Wilson. Since "knowing" is a form of "false consciousness," elites are institutional reifications of this false consciousness that break up the compassionate feeling of our common life in the world.
3) A World is not an ideology nor a scientific institution, nor is it even a system of ideologies; rather, it is a structure of unconscious relations and symbiotic processes. In these living modes of communication in an ecology, even such irrational aspects as noise, pollution, crime, warfare, and evil can serve as constituent elements of integration in which negation is a form of emphasis and hatred is a form of attraction through which we become what we hate. The Second World War in Europe and the Pacific expressed chaos and destruction through maximum social organization; indeed, this extraordinary transnational organization expressed the cultural transition from a civilization organized around literate rationality to a planetary noetic ecosystem in which stress, terrorism, and catastrophes were unconsciously sustained to maintain the historically novel levels of world integration. Through national, thermonuclear terrorism, and as well, through sub-national expressions of terrorism electronically amplified, these levels of stress and catastrophic integration are still at work today. A World should not be seen, therefore, as an organization structured through communicative rationality, but as the cohabitation of incompatible systems by which and through which the forces of mutual rejection serve to integrate the apparently autonomous unities in a meta-domain that is invisible to them but still constituted by their reactive energies.
4) Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World. Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose. Shadow economies (such as the drug traffic between Latin America and the United States), and shadow exports (such as the acid rain from the United States to Canada), and shadow integrations (such as the war between the United States and Japan in the forties) all serve to energize the emergence of a biome that is not governed by conscious purpose.
5) Human beings, therefore, never "know" what they are "doing." Since Being, by definition, is greater than knowing, human beings embody a domain structured by opposites by thinking one thing, but doing another; thus negation becomes a form of emphasis in which cops stimulate robbers, celibates stimulate sexuality, and science stimulates irrational superstition and chaos. In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy. In the domain of religious celibacy, an interdiction serves to mythologize repression and energize lust. In the domain of science, the hatred of ambiguity, wildness, and unmanageability creates a superstitious belief in technology as an idol of control and power; thus irrational experiments like nuclear energy and genetic engineering become forms of seemingly managed activity that generate chaos and disease."
(https://web.archive.org/web/20050907215906/http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC14/Thompson.htm)