The Ideology Blitz

contradictions.

The political class, the mainstream media, and other opinion swayers bombarded the Irish with pro-abortion ideology. It could be called “Marketing”, or even “Public Enlightenment and Propaganda”.

But that’s no way to have a democracy. The democratic system – probably originally intended to permit intelligent discussion to find the most rational and equitable solution to problems – has been turned into a marketing exercise, in which the tools employed to induce people to buy products (even unwanted ones) are used to persuade people to buy ideas.

If it were not so, why the celebrations? Why celebrate that parents can kill their own offspring? Why shed tears of joy? “Oh gosh, what a relief! Now we can have unprotected sex and face no music afterward!” Shouldn’t abortion be a sad, grave decision taken after serious deliberation?

The truth is that the joy was for the marketing victory.

It must have been the same joy experienced across tobacco company boardrooms when the industry penetrated the female smoking market almost 100 years ago. The “Torches of Freedom” marketing campaign persuaded women to take up smoking cigarettes as the next step in emancipation and the acquisition of equality with men. The only party really to benefit from that “liberation” was the tobacco industry. Women just ruined their lungs while never outgrowing their supposed penis envy.

The techniques involved in marketing – harvested from psychology and transplanted on the unsuspecting market – have two aims: to create demand where there’s none and to keep increasing it thereafter.

This is the marketing of ideology. While ideologies abound, only one dominates. And there’s no anti-trust setup to contain abuses of the dominant position.

The current dominant ideology...

... does not support referenda on a three-day working week, now that technology would allow it. Instead, it supports referenda on sexual freedom. The reason why sex and sexual relations should be more important than labour and labour relations is probably that the population should be kept occupied fighting futile personal battles on the private and family fronts.

If it were about population growth, the same ideology would not promote surrogate motherhood, in-vitro fertilisation, gay marriage, and the other sexual “liberation” objectives. Therefore, it’s about something else, not “population growth” (which, like “healthcare”, is used in an Orwellian fashion).

The current dominant ideology promotes the free market and ever-increasing consumption for ever-increasing profit making.

It’s not a novel idea to say that everything revolves round the distribution of available resources among members of the community. And – again to put it in a way which is not novel – history has been a repetition of the same pattern: one part of the community exploits the other(s) to keep to itself the limited resources available.

The dominant ideology seems to be telling us that as a species, our evolution over the millennia had the ultimate goal of reaching the free market economy stage. We evolved in such a way that some of us are exploiters, and the others are the exploited. If it weren’t so, we would be using democracy to change society, and instead of voting on, and in favour of, killing our own offspring (to be “liberated” ... ), we would use democracy to improve our working conditions, to work less and earn more (efficient resource sharing), and so on. Instead, the dominant ideology suggests that living like a perpetual adolescent (according to adolescent spending behavioural patterns) is the ideal. Abortion fits this lifestyle like a glove: have fun but no children, as “no children” equals more money to spend on non-child-related but fun products and services.

Ideology holds us in bondage and we simply cannot imagine ourselves not in bondage. We pas- sively accept that there is no alternative to ideological bondage. So in reality, we live in apparent freedom, subjected to the order imposed on us in the name of Freedom – the freedom to kill our offspring but not the freedom to improve, in tangible ways, our working and living conditions.

There’s an unusual film – John Carpenter’s They Live of 1988 – which explains ideology’s hold on us. The protagonists put on special sunglasses that, according to philosopher Slavoj Žižek, “function like a critique of ideology. They allow you to see the real message beneath all the propaganda, glitz, and posters and so on. … When you put the sunglasses on you see the dictatorship in democracy, the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”

More or less, that’s it.

My personal library (7)

The best pro-abortion book I’ve read is called A Defense of Abortion, written by David Boonin and published in 2002 by Cambridge University Press. Professor Boonin starts the book by telling us that there were photos of his son Eli on the desk right beside him while he was writing this book. The main argument of his book is that it’s fine to end the life of one’s own offspring still in the womb because they lack organised cortical brain activity. (I don’t remember him mentioning the possibility that in the future we might detect such activity; he seems to imply that there’s no chance of technological improvement.)

So the best defence of abortion is to promote the ideology that movement in that part of the brain called “cortex” is what makes us human and endows us with rights, including the right to live. Unlike others, Professor Boonin does admit that the foetus and the future postnatal being are the same substantial being, but he proposes that the foetus lacks certain value-making properties, which thus deny it the right to live. It seems to me that this proposition is a sort of synecdochic fallacy: it elevates a represented part (organised cortical activity) to accurate reflection of the whole it is taken to stand for (the one and same substantial being). It’s as if my skin colour (one of my parts) reflected my entire being, my whole; as if my rights were dependent on my skin colour or my cortical brain activity (one of my parts, be it a characteristic or a bodily activity).

But the point I want to make is that it is all ideology. Boonin’s interpretation is but one of many competing beliefs. It neither flows nor follows from “facts”. It is simply an interpretation of them.

Ideology – or the arbitrary interpretation of “facts” – is constantly hammered into our heads, dominating our worldview, holding us in bondage to apparent freedom.

The questions to ask are always two: who will benefit? And, who pays the price?

To my mind, as things have turned out (by which I mean that there was no original conspiracy; things simply happened, and events unfolded), the benefits of all these supposed freedoms accrue only to those who milk the system. They keep the exploited embroiled in their illusion of freedom and wellbeing or in the tragic situations created by the supposed freedom of others. (Depression does not come from nowhere.)

Had abortion been legalised abroad to benefit the poor, then why were social services not incremented instead? The money was there when the banks were bailed out of the mess of their own making. Millions for the banks and nothing for the poor? And then abortion as the solution for poor families, while spending millions to fund abortion-providing facilities? It’s clear that it has nothing to do with poverty and the poor.

As to who pays the price, I think it is obvious that children always have to pay the price. Perhaps this is the ultimate message of Christianity (now deemed one of the archenemies of late free market ideology).

Perhaps today Christianity is the most pro-child ideology available on the market of ideas. But being outside the ideology, it is underrated and considered passé, and to make matters worse, its marketing department seems to have lost its spirit and given up the ghost.