One of the central tenets of existentialism, forged in the Second World War, was that existence precedes essence. Extrapolated to all of existence, it means that the world as a material thing simply “exists” and it’s up to the human subject to apply essence or meaning to it. If spiritual thinking is the attempt to escape from the apparently harsh reality of life’s meaninglessness, ideology is a desire to transcend the reality of politics.
Politics rests on three fundamental realities: the relations of production, the question of who holds the monopoly on physical violence, and the furtherance of interests. The first involves the gathering, use, and control over essential resources. The second relates to what latitude regular people can have with whoever is in charge, whether that’s a state, the most powerful gang, or a local warlord. And the third simply refers to individuals, families, tribes, communities, institutions, and authorities doing what’s good for them.
This is all politics is—and to paraphrase the hero of The Princess Bride, anyone who tells you differently is either lying or selling something. It’s little more than the branding, marketing, and advertising messaging that obscures what’s really at play: resources, power, and self-interest. It’s a marketplace inhabited by two competitors: a very annoying person telling you that “a better world is possible,” and another very annoying person preaching that “we’ve lost our way.” Want to know what they’re really after? Look no further than leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement cashing in to buy expensive new homes or police abolitionists going on $75,000 spending sprees. Or just look at the entirety of the “prosperity gospel.”
To place ideology within the Judeo-Christian paradigm: leftism is the yearning for the theoretical promised land of Exodus, whereas its right-wing variant forever mourns its own lost Eden of Genesis. Leftism represents the line of thinking that reality and nature can be transcended through political action to bring about emancipation, liberation, and transcendence. Right-wing ideology represents an allegiance to the prevailing power relations and moral attitudes of a certain period of time—usually the adherent’s adolescence, the year of their birth, or a fantastical imagining of the distant past.
To keep people within their respective worlds, each ideology must become more and more absurd whenever the reality of politics begins to break the spell. For the reactionary or conservative—when faced with the contradictions and complexities of their own halcyon days—the absurdity manifests in baffling distortions about the ancient world, the early modern era, or the middle ages grafted onto our own time. Whereas the leftist—bludgeoned by the manifest unworkability of their utopian schemes—reaches for ever-more insane and childlike pronouncements about how violently destroying people’s livelihoods is actually good or how a basic reality (e.g., gravity) is a “just a social construct.”
This dichotomy between reality and ideological shadow-dancing recalls the common phrase that “everything happens for a reason.” Hindsight can show how one event led to a flowering of possibilities that wouldn’t have been ripe for harvest without that key catalyst. However, any meaning we attach can only be applied post-hoc, as we don’t have the knowledge to surmise what significance current events hold.
Besides, any person who uses this Lifetime Television feel-good phrase should be careful with its implications. If everything has a preceding and predetermined meaning, this presents a problem for the spiritual point-of-view. While the phrase may hold some wisdom for everyday mishaps or minor heartbreaks, what does it say about things like pediatric cancer? What about natural disasters that wipe out schools and hospitals? And, not to be cheap and invoke Godwin’s Law, but if everything happens for a reason… how do you explain Auschwitz? How do people who believe in “karma” square this with images of children tossed into the crematorium?
As Slavoj Zizek explains in The Fragile Absolute, the Holocaust bears an “excessive, unbearable reality.” He says, “Although this event set in motion the entire contemporary ethical discussion, it continues to haunt us as a spectral entity that cannot be fully ‘accounted for’, integrated into our social reality, even if we know (almost) all about it on the level of historical facts.” He later hits on one way we attempt to wrestle with events like these: “the images of utter catastrophe, far from giving access to the Real, can function as a protective shield against the Real.”
To illustrate his point, think about the lie we tell ourselves: that the Final Solution was a result of some sort of clinical insanity or scaled-up mind control. Although this may have been true of Hitler himself over time, it can’t be said of every gauleiter or rank-and-file officer in the SS. But the searing images of liberated death camps or of Einsatzgruppen executions serve a unique purpose that allows us to say: “Only madmen are capable of these things.” They allow us to avert our gaze from what Hannah Arendt pointed out in The Banality of Evil; that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary acts of cruelty and violence. And oftentimes, the informing ideology is merely the legitimating narrative that gives them rhetorical permission to do what they want to do anyway.
And although there are meaningful differences between the motivating impulses behind Nazism and Marxist-Leninism, both still resulted in show trials, forced labor camps, and mass executions of political adversaries. Likewise, while Tsarist Russia and Soviet Communism branded themselves differently, they still bore many of the same features. The Tsarist Okhrana was replaced by the Soviet Cheka, NKVD, and then KGB. Each regime used Siberia as the dumping ground for its internal enemies. Each system found ways to justify aggression against its neighbors, or ethnic minorities within its own borders. Ideological justifications for the actions of the USSR, especially in the Stalinist-era, are little more than fantasies projected to mask the unrelenting carnage.
I’m making my own moral claims here, which could be thought of in their own ideological terms. So what does this mean for liberalism, writ-large? Questions like this have political as well as moral implications. In The Future of Liberalism, Alan Wolfe describes how the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755 affected contemporary thinkers and theologians: “As the contemporary philosopher Susan Neiman points out, the Lisbon earthquake changed the way Europeans thought about good and evil. No human being brought the earthquake about: in the absence of any motive for it, was the whole experience, from a philosophical or religious perspective, meaningless? Nothing less than modern philosophy was born out of the Lisbon earthquake… From this time forward, she writes, we would no longer use the term “moral” to describe a phenomenon that, however horrifying, was strictly natural in origin.”
And it’s fitting that modes of thought began to shift just as the mode of production began to shift toward industrialization. Political liberalism only becomes possible with a view of the natural world that is, if not totally secular, at least cautious about reading predetermined moral messages into events. And this view also provided a justifying narrative for the direction economics was moving in anyway.
The fact that we jump to ideological fairytales and fantasies reveals a real civilizational worry. If everything is a matter of power, resources, and negotiated autonomy, what does that say about “liberty,” “justice,” and “equality.” Do these terms become meaningless? I don’t think so. An attachment to these principles, in most cases, does produce tangible differences from societies that disregard them. But to the extent that they serve a worthwhile purpose, they need to account for the reality of politics first, and not used as a stalking horse for dreaming up comforting deceptions.