We live in an incredible era of human history, specifically with respect to technological developments and the educational resources said developments have brought about. Educational content is practically shoved in front of most people whether they want to see it or not by means of the internet. Even outside of traditional educational environments, we have an unprecedented level of exposure and access to educational content and media. And while our current generations might be more educated than the generations of the early to mid 1900's, the rate of how educated our population is has plateaued below expectations as given by these advancements. In other words, people are not as highly educated as our capacities should allow them to be. My goal here is to attribute this phenomena to be, at least in part, the result of ideology.
The critique of ideology is not uncommon in philosophical circles. Primarily conducted from a Marxist perspective, the tradition typically frames ideology as a device used by the elite to manufacture consent for the status quo. The key word here is device, which is to say that ideology is a discrete structure which is crafted in a particular way with the explicitly intent to reinforce an existing power dynamic between the upper class and their subordinates. In this sense, ideology is not adopted in and of itself, but rather is something which is prescribed by the powerful onto the population. Louis Althusser, in his famous essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses frames this situation in the context of state power. He describes the state as
"a 'machine' of repression, which enables the ruling classes (...) to ensure their domination over the working class, thus enabling the former to subject the latter to the process of surplus-value extortion (i.e. to capitalist exploitation)."
Althusser was interested in what he calls Ideological State Apparatuses, which he describes as the "distinct and specialized institutions", such as schools, churches, family, political institutions, etc, which fulfill this exploitation and subjugation via ideology, rather than by force or violence in the case of the traditional state (i.e. government). The effect of ideology in this instance is that it institutes a cultural and political norms, which must be respected at the risk of social repression, such as isolation, expulsion, and so on. The ideas proposed by the ideology are propagated implicitly and discreetly, whereby the elite use ideological state apparatuses as proxies to indirectly exert control over the population.
While this Marxian analysis is a valuable part of understanding ideology, particularly in its phrasing of ideology in the metaphysical sense, I want to develop a departure from this narrative, specifically the influence of the state on particular ideologies. To heavily simplify his position, partly because I don't fully understand it (This is your warning the take the following with a grain of salt), Slavoj Žižek poses that ideology operates on an individual level, thriving off the desires and impulses of our psyche to attach itself onto our conscious. In this sense, ideology is not forced onto us, but rather we seek out ideology out of necessity. What necessity?
"Ideology discursively rationalizes (...) the deep reasons by means of which the subject thinks or acts in certain ways. To this extent, ideology always implies concealment: 'to be effective, the logic of the legitimation of the relations of domination must remain hidden'" (Garcia, Sanchez, 2016)
To arrive back at the original point, I want to argue that this interpretation of ideology gives us an adequate answer to our crisis: why are people so stupid despite all the resources which should prevent it? I will attempt to elaborate on this in a series of posts, so stay tuned for the rest.