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Suppose you live with a group of people who are delusional. Delusion needn't be the product of mental illness (indeed, there appears to be a human need for religion but that's another topic). It can simply be the product of a powerful meme. Nonetheless, they believe in something that is utterly unreasonable and they use it to make your life hard. Not all of them, mind you. Just the powerful ones... Most of them simply keep their delusional beliefs to themselves and let the others do what they will with it. Would you be motivated to take these people out of their delusion, despite that not all of them are using their delusion to hinder your life?
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i've been following this thread but haven't had much to add: this is more a question. a meme on its own wouldn't do what you're attributing to it. a delusional society would have an internal rationality built around what you would consider delusional. if you played along socially with them--if you knew the rules of the social game--then one of the effects would be that what you characterize as delusional wouldn't at all *be* delusional for that community. and without some kind of internal oppositional politics, the class oppression that you talk about would be considered more or less normal as well. (think class relations in the united states if the point seems too abstract--what counts as oppression exactly? the idea moves around, doesn't it?)...
this raises all kinds of questions about ethics in relation to ideology. the usual example is that within the administrative apparatus that administered the holocaust, the project of exterminating the jewish population was understood as a rational administrative goal. the bounded rationality of the bureaucracy--like that of any "corporate culture"---was constructed (though not intentionally so) such that it would have been a real conflict to have raised ethical objections to the administrative end--because the rules within which you, as hypothetical administrator of genocide, would have operated all would have been geared around the assumption--not even the argument or claim--but the assumption that the goal of genocide was value neutral.
this is quite a problem, one that tends to be avoided by most historians of the holocaust--it is much easier to imagine that the germany of the 30s and 40s represented some deviation from the course of modernity than a logical extension of some of its aspects---an exception is zymgunt baumann's book "the holocaust and modernity"---which is good: i'd recommend it even.
i should say--because i know this objection is coming if i dont--that i am NOT EQUATING RELIGION AND THE NAZI ADMINISTRATION OF GENOCIDE. i use the example because (a) i can outline it quickly and (b) because it demonstrates the power of these internal norms/rules precisely because it involves the administrative normalization of an action that anyone would otherwise see as pathological.
so a "delusional culture" or collective would pose a real problem. you would have a very difficult time convincing anyone who lived in a reality shaped by the rules built around the "delusion" that they are delusional. people like to think that ethical arguments would be enough--but if you think about it, and if you look at stuff like baumann talks about, you can see that they are not enough. people tend to like the rationalities they live under--they internalize the norms and rules, they live along them. it is really hard to talk folk out of living that way.
you meant this kind of scenario, yes?
(almost forgot to make a question at the end)