On the Critical Importance of Ideology

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Ideology Defined

What I mean by ideology is an intuitive group thought process by which a society seeks to work through and/or transcend its most pressing percieved limitations, and to attain its collective goals. “Intuitive” here implies both goal orientation and the emotional power to direct attention to goals and the specific conditions, behaviors, and points of view by which the goals of that particular society can be obtained.

Examples of Ideologies

The American Founding Fathers had a consistent ideology which can be styled Egalitarianism, and this is clearly expressed in the founding documents of the American Republic, and other writings of said Fathers. The resounding words of Thos. Jefferson, the drafter of the American Declaration of Independance, “We hold these thruths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal…” have changed life on this planet. Let us not delude ourselves please. American money and military power have not changed life on this planet apart from these words, expressed and supported by our leaders previous to the present treacherous regime. No one in the cohort of our Founding Fathers was a Christian. They were enlightened Deists. There is no founding document of America which traces the basis of the Republic to God, Christian or otherwise. It is traced to the people. The Founding Fathers were the descendants of people who fled persecution in Europe by exactly the same kind of repressive Christian regime that has been practiced and preached on the sacred soil of my beautiful homeland by George W. Bush and his corrupt and decadent ilk.

The traditional stream of philosophical thought that the American Founding Fathers’ ideology emerged from is often styled “The Western Enlightenment Tradition,” which draws from eastern religions, including Buddhism. American Buddhism is a child, not of any particular Asian Buddhist lineage, or any confluence of them, but of the Western Enlightenment Tradition. We number among our Patriarchs the American Founding Fathers as a whole cohort, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the unutterable Henry Steele Olcott and his consort, her feistiness, Madame Helen Blavatsky.

My generation, the Boomers, has an ideology which is in many ways, a reenactment of the ideology of the American Founding Fathers. The current Millineum Generation has a similar ideology. The administration of George W. Bush has a divisive and fundamentally unAmerican ideology of privilege, pre-emptive force, lies, the unlimited use of despotic power against ordinary people and the helpless in particular, systematic and deliberate cruelty, the blatant display of wealth by people who have done nothing to earn it, racism, sexism, religious cultism, war in God’s name, and imperialist global hegemony for the sake of keeping in power a corrupt few against the interests of the many and the whole. Many have characterized this ideology, “neo-conservatism” as evil and demonic, and I am one of them. Oh, and hey, did I mention LIES yet?

The official ideology of traditional China was Confucianism. The long, sad, and unutterably cruel collapse of dynastic China was the failure of its official ideology. Now Maoism is China’s ideology. Please do not imagine that Deng Xiao-Ping and the current plutocratic central government have done away with that ideology. Not at all. This is still what makes that system tick. “Buuuuuuuuu, buh-buh, buh-buh, buh-buh, buttttttttt!!!!!!!!! They believe in money now, right? RIGHT?” Uh-huh, right. And so do we, right? Yeah, but what do we default to when we get into trouble as a whole society? Just as I was getting ready to start writing this, I decided to break by listening to NPR, and the very first thing I heard was this Red Army General, speaking crystal pure Mandarin, who had come to give a pep talk to the troops who had been sent to Szechuan Province to do earthquake relief, and the first words out of his mouth were: “Our Chinese Army is so great because we have arisen from the people…” Hearing that, the ranks then exploded with one voice in a yell of triumph. I had seen pictures of those guys a few days before. They were completely demoralized because there was no enemy there that they could deal with. But, quite literally, one phrase of crystal pure socialism put them right back on their game. Such is the power of ideology. And I believe that that’s enough backstory, and it’s time to segue into the point of the piece.

The Value of Ideology

Ideology gives us a common language that we can talk to each other with, about what we want and care about, and how we intend to get there. It is fundamentally relational, and any ideology promotes group action. Money, in and of itself, does none of the above. Left to its own devices, money creates secretism, self-interest, literal and figurative walls everywhere, torts, regressive social structure, and regressive psychology. When we think, as a whole society, that the only basis of social authority is money, we have departed from the common language by which we know what our neighbor is up to, and in that state of isolation, our reasons for making money and for participating in society fall apart. This is what has happened in America. When we decided that the ideals and the thought of our Founding Fathers was non-essential, and that we could benefit from the egalitarian system that they created by sacrificing their entire lives for it, without participating in the ideology that animated them, we decided wrong.

The power vacuum left behind by that wrong decision, which was made not by one individual or one group, but by the whole society together, when we decided that money was the only thing that mattered, then drew into itself content from hell, aka the evil thing called “neo-conservatism.” So now, in our Democratic primary election, what we’ve got is more an exorcism than a normal political process. That’s why it seems to go on and on and on endlessly, and why the verbal content does not reflect political reality. You turn on the TV the next day, or after the next primary, and there are the SAME highly paid idiots telling you that everything has changed, and you look at it for ten minutes, or even a whole hour, to make sure that they’re lying, again, and turn off the TV. This has been the entirety of American news programming for most of a year, and what is this about, please?

Basically, it’s about a huge and expertly conducted squirrel-hunt by Barak Obama, but that’s not what you see. What you see, if you look closely enough, is the American people, and the leaders of our glorious Democratic Party saying: Wrong! We know what a lying money-grubbing slime-bag looks like, smells like, and is like, and we won’t have it. And we know what the kept woman of a lying money-grubbing slime-bag looks like, smells like, and is like, and we won’t have her, either.

Hillary is wrong when she tries to fault Barak for his use of words. The guy is a master ideologue, and that is what we need now. We can’t go back to the ideological vacuum of the Republicans who think, quite wrongly, that the whole problem with everything is that the people with money aren’t given enough power to do anything. WRONG! The Bush administration has proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that left to their own devices, people with money can’t share, they don’t care, they can’t communicate, they can’t think right, they can’t talk right, and they can’t live right. It takes an entire system of law and government, so dedicated, to bleed anything vaguely resembling economic responsibility, social conscience or human morality, Christian or otherwise, out of the wealthy. Left to their own, they simply become predatory.

We need to be able to yell “Yes we can!” until the money-bagged despots can’t hear themselves think. That’s how you reestablish the fact that the First Amendment means real political power in the hands of ordinary people. We need to elect somebody whose whole basic qualification is that he doesn’t even know how to be corrupt. That’s how you establish the fact that evil shall not prevail. We need to create a Democratic hegemony in this country that will effectively keep the now thoroughly corrupt Republican Party out of power for at least a generation, if not forever. And we shall certainly do that by harking back to, and reenacting, the egalitarian thoughts, ideals, and example of our Founding Fathers.

So be it, so be it, and so be it, by my vow.

GATE, GATE, PARAGATE, PARASAMGATE, BODHI, SVAHA!

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

North Shore of O’ahu, Hawaii, 17 May 08.