Ideology cloaks power
Superficially, the means by which power conceals itself is through stories. Its needs narratives — mainly about those who appear powerful — to create political and social dramas that distract us from thinking about deep power. But more fundamentally still, power depends on ideology. Ideology cloaks power – in a real sense, it is power — because it is the source of power’s invisibility.
Ideology provides the assumptions that drive our perceptions of the world, that prevent us from questioning why some people were apparently born to rule, or have been allowed to enclose vast estates of what was once everyone’s land, or hoard masses of inherited wealth, or are celebrated for exploiting large numbers of workers, or get away with choking the planet to the point at which life itself asphyxiates.
Phrased like that, none of these practices seems natural. In fact, to a visiting Martian they would look pathologically insane, an irrefutable proof of our self-destructiveness as a species. But these conditions are the unexamined background to our lives, just the way things are and maybe always were. The system.
Power can only perpetuate itself by deceiving us about what it has done in the past and will do in the future, and whether alternatives exist. Power tells us stories that it is not power – that it is the rule of law, justice, ethics, protection from anarchy or the natural world, inevitable. And to obscure the fact that these are just stories — and that like all stories, these ones may not actually be true, or may even be the opposite of truth — it embeds these stories in ideology. —Jonathan Cook, How we stay blind to the story of power
- previously: any human power can be changed by human beings, and the only thing keeping a crown on a king’s head is narrative
- see also: abuse isn’t just pathological, it’s political — beware any dismissal that this is “just the way things are”
- see also: power is both structural and ideological