Ideological Domination Quotes

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized opinions and habits of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a "dictator" substitutes himself for the central committee.

We all know what is meant by the term 'international community,' don't we? It's the West, of course, nothing more, nothing less. Using the term 'international community' is a way of dignifying the West, of globalising it, of making it sound more respectable, more neutral and high-faluting.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

Ideas control the world.

Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.

Mexico was conquered more by manipulation of myth and archetype.

What passes for political realism may make for lively academic debates. But it often functions, ironically, as a tool of social control, rendering us passive with an analysis that overwhelms and paralyzes us.

Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.

Bureaucracy is ever desirous of spreading its influence and its power. You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of the people's souls and thoughts.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.

The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.

For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

Do you believe that the German middle class, this flower of the intelligentsia, would refuse to serve us and put their minds at our disposal?... We will do what we like with the German middle class.

The world dominion of western thought, forms of organisation, technology and military force is not God-given, nor eternal, nor greatly appreciated by the rest of the world.

I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.

Tanpinar presciently feared that to embrace the western conception of progress was to be mentally enslaved by a whole new epistemology, one that compartmentalised knowledge and concealed an instrumental view of human beings as no more than things to be manipulated.

Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather: all pervasive and virtually inescapable.

I am at war... with the principal personage of traditional philosophy, that abstract subject who masquerades as everyone and anyone, but is really a male subject in disguise.

'Prison Notebooks' gives me a basic understanding of how power can influence people through cultural products and intellectual groups, so they will voluntarily support the hegemony.

It is one of the dangerous self-deceptions of our society to pretend that mechanisms of control do not really exist, and to maintain, without qualification, that we are an economically "free" people.

… a puppet of the reactionaries

So persuasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences but actually our sense of possibilities.

[The United States] dreams of world domination, resolves to control the resources of other nations, wants to shape the world according to its ideas, and seeks to impose its values and ideology on others by force.

The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.