Adherents of the more advanced ideologies tend to be more individualistic in their thinking, to distinguish themselves more sharply both from the general community and from each other than do those of the less advanced. This is notoriously so in politics; there are not many articles on the Labour Party which do not compare its… read more »
A constant theme of the intellectuals is that people generally are becoming less inclined to accept what they are told by authorities and traditionalists, more inclined to guide their behaviour by their own critical thinking. Against this, systematic ideology draws attention to the weight of evidence showing that the mental attitude favoured by the intellectuals… read more »
PART ONE It is seldom easy for the two parties to any serious discussion to speak directly to each other’s arguments, and when they are adherents of different major ideologies the difficulty is increased. They often find they are talking past each other; each feels the other is failing to meet his points and is… read more »
The reformist and revolutionary movements have a strong tendency to think of themselves as rationalistic, and rationalism works on the belief that if only people will divest themselves of prejudice, attend to the evidence and think clearly, they will arrive at the correct solutions to social problems; it implies that for each problem there can… read more »
One of the many subjects on which almost no ideological work has been done is mysticism. I do not propose to undertake a study of it here. All I want to do is to examine two things sometimes thought to constitute barriers to any objective investigation of the subject. The first thing to be done… read more »
RELIGION: I’m an atheist, thank God! POLITICS: I’m an anti-ism-ist. WOMEN’S LIB: I want to be a male chauvinist pig, but my wife won’t let me. from Ideological Commentary 9, February 1981.
Newcomers to systematic ideology are often surprised at the amount of attention paid to the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB). One reason for it is that in this organisation we find fully developed, set out ready for our inspection, the tendencies (in the jargon of s.i. the “eidodynamic” tendencies) which characterise the Left. One… read more »
The widespread publicity recently given to the atom, as a consequence of public interest in the epoch-making event of the employment of sub-atomic energy as a weapon of war, is naturally devoted only to the direct and more spectacular issues and aspects of the atom’s nature. There is, however, another aspect of the subject –… read more »
Both Harold Walsby and George Walford assumed that the eidodynamic levels were materialist. All their descriptions, from 1948 to 1994, take for granted that there is just one route through the eidodynamic levels, and that it is a materialist route. No doubt the reason for this was that their work was always directed towards the… read more »
Although it would be going too far to say that all anarchists oppose all forms of religion, we can safely say that nearly all of them would like to do away with the authoritarian versions.Are they justified? Certainly this form of religion has done a great deal of harm, but after taking full account of… read more »