Ideology

When reading the chapter on ideology it was like reading about me, everything in this chapter described me. Ideology is the belief in something imaginary. Or at least that is how Althusser put it, and that is exactly how it is, all humankind is broken down into beliefs, they don’t even have to be necessarily true. From birth until death we follow things as we are told. I found it interesting to find out that we are all subjects, even before birth. We are all assigned to someone; we all have parents and become their children. We become sons or daughters; we are assigned a name and therefore become their property (in a sense). From then on we are told how to act “civilized,” and I always wondered why we act a certain way, when it is more than obvious that people wish to act a different way. Is it really the ideology of separating ourselves from the animals? Or is it just brainwashing into becoming how people want others to act, here we are introduced to the imaginary. For example with religion, we believe in religion but it is something never to be seen. It is just something that you see in the people who pray the people who attend church and even in the people who live a certain believing that someone is observing them. Here is one positive look at ideology, a look at people who change themselves for the better. But what happens when ideology takes a negative turn, this was the focus of Jim Walker in the article The Problem with Belief, “People have slaughtered each other in wars, inquisitions, and political actions for centuries and still kill each other over beliefs in religions, political ideologies, and philosophies. These belief-systems, when stated as propositions, may appear mystical, and genuine to the naive, but when confronted with a testable bases from reason and experiment, they fail miserably. I maintain that beliefs create more social problems than they solve and that beliefs, and especially those elevated to faith, produce the most destructive potential to the future of humankind.” What this basically states is that beliefs help create more issues than they solve, especially those that become personal. But the personal is the fuel behind the ideological, so the ideology in the end does not have to be factual because factuality isn’t represented here.

Works Cited

“Walker, Jim.” The Problems with Belief. 1997. Web. 16 May 2010

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideoligical State Apparatus.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Maichael. Victoria, Aus.: Blackwell Publishing, 1998. 693-702. Print.