I eagerly wait his reply. I suspect his brain has tripped his circuit breaker trying to think
Seems like the whole world is dealing with the same problems
- Thread starter Librtlover
- Start date
There are none so blind, it's said.
I suppose he does the best he can with what he has, poor thing.
On that note, I see post after post saying, “Imagine if the roles were reversed.”
Not just here; I see it on X, where the big boys and girls post. Instagram. Facebook. Reddit, too.
But who are the role reversal theorists appealing to?
It seems to me that many Americans (and other English-speaking peoples) were scammed into seeing Western civilization as morally tainted, then finessed into surrendering it as “restorative justice.”
Look at the scam.
Over decades, leftist theory subverted the institutions and it redefined the linchpins of Western civilization one by one as forms of "oppression".
Property became "exploitation".
Family became "patriarchy".
Nationhood became "exclusion".
Western history became "colonialism".
Inherited institutions and ethnicity (but only white people's) became "privilege".
Traditional norms became "hierarchy".
The vocabulary changes, but the playbook stayed the same: locate domination inside the inherited form, then make liberation mean overcoming it.
AFAIK, there's no single manifesto blatantly proclaiming that “Western civilization must disappear” because that would have given away the game.
The Trojan Horse disgorged its lethal contents piecemeal in bite-sized slogans the gullible could fit on a bumper sticker of a protest sign: smash the patriarchy, expand diversity, equity, and inclusion, deconstruct the norm, decolonize the curriculum, redistribute the power, abolish the hierarchy.
Each demand looked local to the uncritical thinker, but the astroturfing was universal. Together, the left's cadres of thought leaders taught their simple sheep that the recognizable parts of Western civilization were things to tear down.
Eventually the conclusion formed in what the late Rush Limbaugh described as "young skulls full of mush"; maybe the problem is that my civilization still exists.
Maybe, whispered the pernicious pied pipers of progressivism, by destroying (from within, a little bit at a time) the institutions, boundaries, commonly-observed norms, and achievements that made Western civilization what it is, the good things (prosperity, protection from crime, etc., were detachable from the civilization that had produced and sustained them.
Free stuff! Social justice! Diversity, inclusivity, equity!
Freedom, prosperity, science, cooperation, technology, social trust. All yours for the taking!
The bishops of Bolshevism told their congregation (that's what they are) that all the wonderful-sounding Utopian stuff was trapped inside bad historical forms that unfairly excluded the "deserving".
Western civilization was recast as a piggy bank.
The goodies were inside it.
Break the oppressive shell with the hammer. Use the sickle to cut down any opposition.
Grab the goodies.
Leftists, whether they realize it or not, are eager to tear down their own Western civilization because they were persuaded that everything it produces worth keeping would somehow continue to be made available after its destruction.
News to me. I know no leftist who does that. Try being rational, give evidence.
You asked for evidence. The evidence is not a confession.
It is the output of the institutions that form people's ideological opinions.
If you can, look at what many modern Western educational, cultural, and communications apparatuses actually teach (and reward):
- Property and profit as exploitation
- The two-parent family as patriarchy
- Borders and citizenship as exclusion
- The Western historical record as original sin
- Merit and inherited competence as privilege
Those do not look like fringe opinions to me.
AFAIK, they are the operating vocabulary of universities, NGOs, HR departments, newsrooms, and a large part of the civil service bureaucracy
People who have been formed inside those environments may not think of themselves as “tearing down Western civilization.”
They may, instead, experience themselves as removing oppression. Redefinition, as I mentioned before.
That is exactly how I believe ideological systems work: the subjects work all by themselves, each believing they are thinking good thoughts and doing good things. They may not even be aware of the collective.
If your test is “I have never met a leftist who said the quiet part out loud,” you have set a test that no structural claim can ever pass.
That is not rationality.
I am not going to debate an AI program.
You asked for evidence. I pointed at the output. Walking away because you dislike it is not a rebuttal.
Clearly you did not understand. I did not say, post something from an AI program.
Are you so stupid you cannot write your own words?!
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher who studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became professor of philosophy.
Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. In 1980, he killed his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, by strangling her. He was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years. He did little further academic work, dying in 1990. Althusser is commonly referred to as a structural Marxist.
His 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” is the cleanest explanation I've seen of how a ruling order reproduces itself without having to point a gun at everyone every day.
This was the theoretical engine behind a lot of the “playbook” language in the post I wrote earlier.
A mode of production must reproduce two things:
Marx already said the first. Althusser’s question is how the second is secured day after day so that workers show up, managers manage, and most people treat the existing order as obvious. Force alone cannot do it.
Althusser split the state apparatus:
Repressive State Apparatus (RSA)
Government, army, police, courts, prisons.
This apparatus uses violence (or the credible threat of it). Ideology is secondary.
Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)
A plurality of institutions that look “private”:
These organizations are largely segregated by ideology. Repression is veiled, i.e. (expulsion from school, shunning in the family, cancellation, professional blacklisting).
There is only one RSA; there are many ISAs. The RSA is relatively unified and public. The ISAs are scattered and often appear independent of the state.
But they all propagate the dominant ideology.
Althusser' observed that in pre-capitalist Europe the dominant ISA was the Church, paired with the family.
He said that in mature capitalism the dominant ISA is the school, still paired with the family.
The school takes children for years and does two things at once during their formative years
Althusser’s line is that the school presents itself as neutral and “purged of ideology.”
That is precisely why it is so effective. The children leave believing they have freely chosen their place.
“Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects.”
The classic illustration: a policeman shouts “Hey, you there!” Most people turn around. In that turning they recognize themselves as the one who was addressed — as a subject who is already subject to the law. The same thing happens, more quietly, every day in school, family, media, and work.
Result: the great majority of “good subjects” work all by themselves. They recognize that “it really is true that it is so and not otherwise.” Only the “bad subjects” require the RSA.
There is no outside of ideology. Even the scientist or the revolutionary is constituted as a subject inside some ideology.
The essay itself is relatively short and IMO quite readable (the Marxists.org version is the standard English text). The longer, unfinished manuscript On the Reproduction of Capitalism adds more detail on the school and on law.
Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. In 1980, he killed his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, by strangling her. He was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years. He did little further academic work, dying in 1990. Althusser is commonly referred to as a structural Marxist.
His 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” is the cleanest explanation I've seen of how a ruling order reproduces itself without having to point a gun at everyone every day.
This was the theoretical engine behind a lot of the “playbook” language in the post I wrote earlier.
What he said
A mode of production must reproduce two things:
- the productive forces (machines, skills, raw materials)
- the relations of production (who owns, who works, who commands, who obeys)
Marx already said the first. Althusser’s question is how the second is secured day after day so that workers show up, managers manage, and most people treat the existing order as obvious. Force alone cannot do it.
RSA vs ISA
Althusser split the state apparatus:
Repressive State Apparatus (RSA)
Government, army, police, courts, prisons.
This apparatus uses violence (or the credible threat of it). Ideology is secondary.
Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)
A plurality of institutions that look “private”:
- religious (churches)
- educational (schools, public and private)
- family
- legal
- political (parties, the political system)
- labor-unions
- communications (press, radio, television)
- cultural (literature, arts, sports)
These organizations are largely segregated by ideology. Repression is veiled, i.e. (expulsion from school, shunning in the family, cancellation, professional blacklisting).
There is only one RSA; there are many ISAs. The RSA is relatively unified and public. The ISAs are scattered and often appear independent of the state.
But they all propagate the dominant ideology.
Why the school replaced the church
Althusser' observed that in pre-capitalist Europe the dominant ISA was the Church, paired with the family.
He said that in mature capitalism the dominant ISA is the school, still paired with the family.
The school takes children for years and does two things at once during their formative years
- teaches technical know-how (reading, arithmetic, later specialized skills)
- wraps that know-how in the ruling ideology: rules of good behavior, civic conscience, respect for the existing division of labor, the proper way to speak to subordinates or superiors.
Althusser’s line is that the school presents itself as neutral and “purged of ideology.”
That is precisely why it is so effective. The children leave believing they have freely chosen their place.
Two theses on ideology
- “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”
It is not simply “false consciousness” or a pack of lies. It is the necessary, lived relation people have to the real conditions. You experience yourself as a free subject making choices; that experience is the ideology. - “Ideology has a material existence.”
It exists in practices and rituals inside concrete apparatuses: the classroom ritual, the family dinner table, the news cycle, the church service, the HR training, the diversity workshop. Ideas do not float; they are enacted.
Interpellation (the key mechanism)
“Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects.”
The classic illustration: a policeman shouts “Hey, you there!” Most people turn around. In that turning they recognize themselves as the one who was addressed — as a subject who is already subject to the law. The same thing happens, more quietly, every day in school, family, media, and work.
Result: the great majority of “good subjects” work all by themselves. They recognize that “it really is true that it is so and not otherwise.” Only the “bad subjects” require the RSA.
There is no outside of ideology. Even the scientist or the revolutionary is constituted as a subject inside some ideology.
The essay itself is relatively short and IMO quite readable (the Marxists.org version is the standard English text). The longer, unfinished manuscript On the Reproduction of Capitalism adds more detail on the school and on law.
Antonio Francesco Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist and politician. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party.
Gramsci is the strategist.
Whereas Althusser described how Western society reproduces itself, Gramsci described how you infiltrate, suborn, and capture the machinery of society without overt bloodshed.
He wrote it in Mussolini’s prisons (1926–1937). The Prison Notebooks are fragmentary, coded, and unfinished. The useful core is small and sharp.
Rule is not only force. In the West it is force plus consent.
A class is hegemonic when its view of the world becomes common sense: the background assumptions people use to interpret their own lives. They do not experience themselves as ruled. They experience the existing order as normal, moral, and inevitable.
Gramsci’s formula is so simple: State = political society + civil society.
In Russia, in 1917, the veneer of civil society was thin.
In the West, it was thicker.
Gramsci knew the same playbook would not work in both societies.
War of maneuver: frontal assault. Seize the state, count on the rest collapsing. Bolshevik 1917.
Works when the defensive structure is weak.
War of position: long, multi-front struggle inside a civil society.
Displace the old "common sense" and install a new one. In the West, Gramsci said, this is the only form that is strategically possible.
Thus, the left's focus on redefining words.
The cultural fight is not the warm-up. It is the politics.
That is the “long march through the institutions” in the original language.
East German Rudi Dutschke popularized the phrase later; the roadmap was Gramsci’s design.
Every class (working/middle, etc.) produces its own intellectuals.
Teachers, journalists, priests, managers, union officials, artists, HR directors, curriculum writers. They give their class “homogeneity and an awareness of its own function.”
Traditional intellectuals look independent (the old clergy, the “disinterested” scholar). They usually serve the preexisting order.
Organic intellectuals are generated by a rising "challenger" class (like Communism/Marxism/Socialism) articulates its worldview as universal.
The task of the challenger class is to produce its own organic intellectuals and occupy the same posts the old ones hold: the school, the paper, the party, the cultural office. Then, by attrition, the ideologues replace the old guard. The process is bloodless (usually), and is less obvious than a purge.
“All men are intellectuals,” Gramsci wrote, “but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.”
The left's fight is over who performs that function.
Common sense (senso comune): the contradictory, inherited stew of folklore, religion, slogans, and half-remembered school lessons that ordinary people use to get through the day. It is not stupid. It is unsystematic. Hegemony lives here.
Good sense (buon senso): the coherent kernel that can be extracted and reorganized into a new philosophy of praxis.
The war of position is the work of turning common sense.
Althusser asked: how do the indoctrinated see themselves working “all alone”?
Gramsci asked: how does a group make its story the story everyone tells?
Same terrain, different angle:
My first post ITT described the result: property, family, nation, history, and merit recoded as oppression.
Gramsci explains the subversive campaign that produces the result that all leftists perforce work toward, whether they know it or not: leftists occupy civil society, install organic intellectuals, make their new vocabulary feel like common sense, then the mass of leftists will dismantle the old norms at the ballot box while believing they are removing injustice.
My piggy-bank metaphor holds.
Gramsci might add, do not smash the bank on day one. You staff it, rewrite the deposit slips, and teach the customers that keeping the valuable things in the vault was always theft.
Gramsci is the strategist.
Whereas Althusser described how Western society reproduces itself, Gramsci described how you infiltrate, suborn, and capture the machinery of society without overt bloodshed.
He wrote it in Mussolini’s prisons (1926–1937). The Prison Notebooks are fragmentary, coded, and unfinished. The useful core is small and sharp.
Hegemony
Rule is not only force. In the West it is force plus consent.
A class is hegemonic when its view of the world becomes common sense: the background assumptions people use to interpret their own lives. They do not experience themselves as ruled. They experience the existing order as normal, moral, and inevitable.
Gramsci’s formula is so simple: State = political society + civil society.
- Political society: army, police, courts, administration — coercion.
- Civil society: schools, churches, press, parties, unions, clubs, culture — the “trenches and fortifications” where consent is organized.
In Russia, in 1917, the veneer of civil society was thin.
In the West, it was thicker.
Gramsci knew the same playbook would not work in both societies.
War of maneuver vs war of position
War of maneuver: frontal assault. Seize the state, count on the rest collapsing. Bolshevik 1917.
Works when the defensive structure is weak.
War of position: long, multi-front struggle inside a civil society.
Displace the old "common sense" and install a new one. In the West, Gramsci said, this is the only form that is strategically possible.
Thus, the left's focus on redefining words.
The cultural fight is not the warm-up. It is the politics.
That is the “long march through the institutions” in the original language.
East German Rudi Dutschke popularized the phrase later; the roadmap was Gramsci’s design.
Organic intellectuals
Every class (working/middle, etc.) produces its own intellectuals.
Teachers, journalists, priests, managers, union officials, artists, HR directors, curriculum writers. They give their class “homogeneity and an awareness of its own function.”
Traditional intellectuals look independent (the old clergy, the “disinterested” scholar). They usually serve the preexisting order.
Organic intellectuals are generated by a rising "challenger" class (like Communism/Marxism/Socialism) articulates its worldview as universal.
The task of the challenger class is to produce its own organic intellectuals and occupy the same posts the old ones hold: the school, the paper, the party, the cultural office. Then, by attrition, the ideologues replace the old guard. The process is bloodless (usually), and is less obvious than a purge.
“All men are intellectuals,” Gramsci wrote, “but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.”
The left's fight is over who performs that function.
Common sense vs good sense
Common sense (senso comune): the contradictory, inherited stew of folklore, religion, slogans, and half-remembered school lessons that ordinary people use to get through the day. It is not stupid. It is unsystematic. Hegemony lives here.
Good sense (buon senso): the coherent kernel that can be extracted and reorganized into a new philosophy of praxis.
The war of position is the work of turning common sense.
How this sits next to Althusser — and next to my earlier posts
Althusser asked: how do the indoctrinated see themselves working “all alone”?
Gramsci asked: how does a group make its story the story everyone tells?
Same terrain, different angle:
| Althusser | Gramsci |
|---|---|
| ISAs reproduce the relations of production | Civil society is the hegemonic apparatus |
| School replaced the Church as dominant ISA | Schools, press, culture are the trenches |
| Interpellation: “Hey, you there!” | Common sense: it already feels true |
| Subjects work by themselves | Consent is organized, not spontaneous |
| Functional reproduction | Strategic capture |
My first post ITT described the result: property, family, nation, history, and merit recoded as oppression.
Gramsci explains the subversive campaign that produces the result that all leftists perforce work toward, whether they know it or not: leftists occupy civil society, install organic intellectuals, make their new vocabulary feel like common sense, then the mass of leftists will dismantle the old norms at the ballot box while believing they are removing injustice.
My piggy-bank metaphor holds.
Gramsci might add, do not smash the bank on day one. You staff it, rewrite the deposit slips, and teach the customers that keeping the valuable things in the vault was always theft.
Biden's handlers did with their open borders policy.
Obama, the same. He was more opaque about doing it with his dreamers scam.
What does that have to do with Western civilization?
By the way, I don't give a shit about immigration policy.
T. A. Gardner
Serial Thread Killer
Neither have you so...
I have.
Unlike you, I do not constantly lie about my knowledge.
T. A. Gardner
Serial Thread Killer
Okay, what was your most liked part of it and why?