John Rowan: Why Walsby Can’t Be Researched

I was registered for seven years at the London School of Economics to write a PhD thesis on Walsby’s theory. However, in the end I withdrew without having done it. There were many reasons for this, but one was paramount: it can’t be done. The reason is this: the definition of the lowest level of indeology, which you will remember contains most of the people in all cultures, is Expedient. In other words, these people have no ideology of their own, and simply adjust to whatever is around at the time. So the question then arises: If some people are Conservative, and some people are Expedient people taking on all the Conservative assumptions and identifications, how do you tell them apart? I believe that there is no way of doing so.

This is basically the same problem as arises in connection with false consciousness. If the workers are miserably ground down by capitalism, but think they are happy and well fed, the job of the revolutionary cadres is to show people that in spite of their false happiness they are really ground down and miserable. But revolutionaries down the years have found it very difficult to prove to people that they are deprived and exploited, when they feel quite satisfied with their lot.

So here, how do we prove that someone who claims to be a liberal is nothing of the kind, but really an Expedient personal pretending to be a liberal? The answer is that you can’t. End of story.

9 August 2005