Ideologies, Narratives, Simulacra and Substance (Realism) We Cannot Eliminate — If We Can’t Get Rid of Them, Let’s Put Contemporary Philosophy to Work — …presenting “difficult contemporary thought” as a practical life-tool / app…

Ideologies, Narratives, Simulacra and Substance (Realism) We Cannot Eliminate — If We Can’t Get Rid of Them, Let’s Put Contemporary Philosophy to Work — …presenting “difficult contemporary thought” as a practical life-tool / app… Here I’ll use ideology as the main axis, but include narratives, simulacra and “substance” (realism) as part of the same bundle. The core proposal is: “Ideology can’t be abolished. If so, let’s tame it smartly with contemporary thought and Buddhism.” Instead of treating ideology as a pure evil that must be purged, I take a very pragmatic stance: Ideology is something we cannot completely get rid of. Then the question becomes: how to use it so that it works three-ways good (for oneself, for others, and for society). This connects to “beyond structuralism” — a kind of active, constructive nihilism that accepts the emptiness of foundations, but still builds something multiple and livable on top of that. 1. We Can Criticize It, But We Can’t Abolish It Ideologies, narratives, simulacra, “substance” (realism)… All of these can certainly be criticized — but they cannot be erased. Whatever “human nature” may be, these are part of its basic components. They’re not things we can lock away forever in some warehouse and forget; they regularly need to be brought to the surface and used. So if they are going to be there anyway, it’s better to: stop merely hating them or refusing to touch them, and look for their good uses so that they can be put to work in our lives and in society. 2. Structuralism / Post-structuralism: Dismantling, Re-building, Relativizing If you’re lucky and conditions are right, there are moments when ideology loosens or thins out. For example, when people are: eating and drinking together, joking, teasing and laughing, then ideology, narrative, simulacra, realism don’t disappear, but they become softer, more playful, “everyone’s in on the joke” versions of themselves. If laughter rises to the level of real hilarity, people may even enter a kind of temporary egolessness; the frontal lobes loosen their grip. Ideology is still there, but it’s very diluted. Structuralism and post-structuralism are essentially toolkits for: analyzing and dismantling these structures, re-combining and re-building them, and finally, relativizing them. 3. The Word “Ideology” Itself Is Misleading We really need to distinguish two meanings of “ideology”: The original, etymological sense The way the word is used with a “cringey” vibe in contemporary Japanese The term invites misunderstanding, and the way I’m about to use it may well be a kind of “misuse”. I could have chosen words like thought, world-view, doctrine instead, but I intentionally stick with ideology because it carries a peculiar flavor: pushy, sticky, a bit creepy, like a mix of emotionally unstable types, stalkers, and religious fanatics. Etymologically it’s idea + logos — in English “idea” + “logic” — which doesn’t sound especially deranged. Yet in actual usage it often points to that kind of suffocating, obsessive structure. It’s not that the word ideology is evil. It’s more that: many people have used ideology in ways that impose on others, ignore or twist logic, proselytize aggressively, pull people into a bottomless swamp, or drag down and exclude dissenters, and so the word has accumulated a pretty bad image. It’s like the phrase “a man’s romance” (otoko no roman): There was a time when it sounded cool or noble. Now it feels embarrassing, dated, almost like high-school edginess. That’s not the fault of the phrase itself; it’s because the people who shouted “this is a man’s romance!” often looked uncool, or behaved badly under the banner. You could call this the “ideology of ideology becoming cliché” — its hollowing and fossilization. It tickles that sweet-painful sense of youthful embarrassment in the distance. 4. Handling Ideology in a Cool, Smart, Intelligent Way In essence, ideology is “a relatively coherent package of human thought”. So we cannot do without it. But we can choose: not to be like mentally unstable stalkers or zealots, not to harass others, not to be clingy, not to twist or ignore reason, not to preach endlessly or pull people into a bottomless pit, not to use it as a tool for exclusion. If we mishandle ideology, our personal image suffers. In this world, things like: trust / credit, reputation, esteem, status are all important social assets. So we need ways of using ideology that do not corrode those assets. It’s better for everybody if we can interact with ideology in a way that is: cool, smart, and genuinely intelligent. That way, it becomes a triple win — good for oneself, for specific others, and for society at large. 5. Contemporary Thought: Starting from the Critique of Ideology To handle ideology skilfully, I recommend making use of contemporary philosophy. Mahayana Buddhism (in its deep sense, not as a mere “religion”) can play the same role. Both, in their different ways, were born out of a project of critical dissolution: they take something powerful and seemingly self-evident, dismantle it, relativize it, and then try to see what can be rebuilt afterward. Roughly speaking, we can juxtapose them as follows: On the contemporary thought side, the objects of critique are: shallow layer: Marxism, Christianity, middle layer: narratives, Eurocentrism, logocentrism, anthropocentrism, deep layer: ideology as such, metaphysics, realism. On the Buddhist side, the objects of critique are: shallow layer: naive realism, the belief in self-subsisting essences, middle layer: samsaric rebirth, deep layer: Aryan / Vedic frameworks, the overall social-religious system of that world. If we cut through this in cross-section, we can phrase it as: Contemporary thought and Mahayana Buddhism are both “technologies for dissolving and rebuilding ideology”. 6. How Contemporary Philosophy Treats Ideology Humans cannot escape ideology. So we might as well learn to live with it well. Contemporary thought gives us at least three major operations: Creation We can deliberately create an ideology. That is, assemble a coherent framework of ideas. Modification We can modify an existing ideology, patch holes, adjust concepts, refactor it. Deconstruction We can, in some cases, take an ideology apart so thoroughly that it no longer functions as the same ideology. This is what’s usually called deconstruction. Deconstruction can: dismantle an ideology, shift and deform it into something else, or, depending on the method, paradoxically construct another ideology. On the Buddhist side, these operations correspond to: emptiness (śūnyatā), dependent origination (pratītya-samutpāda), the methodology of Madhyamaka (Middle Way / Middle Theory). A second major move is relativization. In recent psychology this is called meta-cognition. In contemporary thought, certain strands of post-structuralism. In Buddhism, it’s the Middle Way / Middle View / “in-between”. If there is only one ideology, we have no choice but to: submit to it, or reject it without having anywhere else to go. Once there are many ideologies, though: we can compare them from a bird’s-eye view, we can make conscious choices about which ones we adopt and when. A small mathematical analogy: In addition to 0 and 1, 2 is also a special number — the first number that allows true comparison. With 3, 4 and upward, once we have “more than we can instantly grasp”, we begin to sense something like infinity. With two ideologies we can do controlled experiments; with three we can have both negative and positive controls; with many we can do multi-factor analysis and data science — the horizon on which today’s AI sits. This is a bit rough, but the idea is: For a long time, the “one and only worldview” on earth was naive realism. Denying what’s right in front of your eyes requires special techniques. Those techniques are: historically, the Buddha’s teaching 2600 years ago and Nāgārjuna’s Mahayana Buddhism, and in the 20th century, the cluster of movements we call contemporary thought. In short: Contemporary thought and Buddhism give us “glasses” that let us soak in ideology while still seeing ourselves from outside. 7. What Counts as Ideology? We are not meant to be ideology’s puppets, slaves or livestock. Ideally we should be: puppeteers of ideology, masters or keepers of ideologies. Here I use “ideology” in a very broad sense: foundations of mathematics and logic, scientific theories, philosophies, and even smaller units — laws, principles, axioms inside those systems. You don’t actually need a big monolithic system. A single coherent way of seeing something is already an ideology in miniature. If you push it that far, even: individual ideas, single sentences, start to look like mini-ideologies. So what is not ideology? Probably only very special states: severe disorganization of thought, schizophrenic loosening of associations → word salad → incoherence, conditions where neither the person themself nor others can find a stable “handle” to communicate with. In some strands of contemporary thought this gets framed as: “parano” — any discourse, even when contradictory or skewed, that still functions communicatively and can be “understood” as having meaning; versus “schizo” — where the structure falls apart so much that even that level of “as if understanding” no longer holds. From this angle: Any coherent, communicative discourse — even one full of contradictions — is parano. That is, it belongs to the world of ideology. Among ideologies, we can then distinguish: Consistent ideologies Those that aim at coherence, non-contradiction, internal consistency. The “classic” scientific or philosophical models. Paraconsistent ideologies Those that contain contradictions and yet still function. The messy, passionate, self-contradictory packages that real humans actually live inside. We can also sort by composition: Pure ideologies Formed mainly from a single system. E.g., Plato or Hegel might be relatively “pure-system” thinkers. Co-existent ideologies Multiple systems placed side-by-side without much interaction. For instance, Aristotle or Kant’s “this as physics, that as ethics, that as metaphysics” structure. Complicated / entangled ideologies Multiple systems tangled together like a spaghetti plate. Marx or medieval scholastic theology might fit here. By analogy with energy debates we might even classify ideologies like energy sources: Clean / green, Dirty / brown, Grey, Dark, etc. A Rough Energetic Classification Label Energy metaphor As ideology Examples / images Clean Renewable Socially acceptable and sustainable Liberalism, some forms of SDGs Dirty Fossil fuel High output but highly divisive Hard exclusionism, violent extremism Gray Background potential energy So normalized it’s invisible “common sense” Everyday capitalism, habits Para Pseudo-energy Lifestyle disguised as belief system Extreme fads, cultish wellness Paraconsistent Perpetual-motion fantasy Runs on contradiction, runaway logic Populism, doublethink More systematically, we can think in two axes: Degree of pollution Violence, exclusion, information pollution. Degree of self-reflexivity Meta-cognition, openness to self-correction. Then we might get: high self-reflexivity × low pollution → clean / green ideologies, low self-reflexivity × high pollution → brown ideologies, mid-range on both → grey ideologies, low reflexivity × high pollution + concealment → dark ideologies, and “contradiction-embracing mode” → paraconsistent ideologies, which can appear anywhere on the map. With such a framework we can play at: locating current online discourse, plotting political movements or parties, mapping historical ideologies (Marxism, neoliberalism, nationalism, etc.), or exploring paths like: “How do we refactor a brown ideology so it moves closer to clean?” “What kind of ethical constraints should paraconsistent ideologies have?” 8. Ideology as Structure, Material, and Debris If we use: post-structuralist relativism, and Buddhist Middle-Way thinking, as practical tools, they become: analysis tools, dismantling tools, modification tools, and construction tools. Ideology is, in plainer language, a way of thinking, a way of seeing, a structure. When we analyze, dismantle, modify or construct, it helps tremendously to know many structures in advance — many ways of thinking and seeing. So the first step in a “practical contemporary philosophy” is: Collecting ideologies — or more gently, collecting perspectives, schemata, patterns. You can: collect them in advance, or invent them on the spot whenever analysis or reconstruction is needed. But in addition, it’s useful to have multiple information-processing methods in your toolbox from the start; otherwise, when nothing comes to mind, you’re stuck. Conversely, if you know even one good method, you can always fall back on it to do at least one form of reductionist analysis. 9. Non-logical / Non-rational Ideologies: Toward a Map of “Non-Truths” We tend to equate “ideology” with: rational, propositional, logically structured content. But there are also: non-rational, non-truth-valued, non-logical ideologies: passions, emotions, desires, resentments, celebrations. There are formal studies of contradiction — paraconsistent logic, dialetheism and so on — but their scope is limited. What we really need is to be able to use paraconsistent ideologies: the messy structures that drive real people and societies, which can’t be squeezed into pure True/False logic. That’s where the big project outlined in your draft — a “study of non-truths”, a map of the “dark continent of non-logos” — comes in: looking at non-logical aspects of the mind, non-logical rhetoric and sophistry in interpersonal communication, and non-logical structures at the level of culture and crowds. From here we can build multi-layer maps: Inner-psychic non-logos desire, impulse, emotion, cognitive bias, defense mechanisms, paranoid world-building, manic flights, depressive collapses. Interpersonal non-logos Gish gallop, straw-man, whataboutism, “Shinjiro-style” tautological speech, moral grandstanding and virtue signaling, weaponized victimhood, “the atmosphere” as a silent censor. Collective / cultural non-logos Bakhtinian carnival and internet “matsuri”, resentment (ressentiment) structures, post-truth and narrative wars, floods of slogans and memes. In other words, we start to see that most of real social life is driven not by strict logic, but by these non-logical flows. From here, the thesis of your draft becomes clear: Human beings and societies cannot be understood or built by “truth” and “logic” alone. Those are just one small corner of a much vaster landscape. And therefore: We need toolkits — contemporary philosophy, Mahayana Buddhism, and modern mathematics — that can give us a clear fixed point (logic / truth), but also let us map, relativize and play with the non-logical continent. 10. A World Woven From Consistent and Paraconsistent Ideologies In the end, the only world accessible to human cognition is: full of contradictions, absurdities and injustices, occasionally containing locally coherent zones, and always heavily simplified by limited minds. This very simplification may be what allowed Homo sapiens to survive while: Neanderthals and Denisovans — who may have had “better raw brains” — disappeared (though parts of them live on in our genes). Computers, AIs, supercomputers, quantum machines all struggle with this domain of: rough simplification, contradiction, and non-logic. So people naturally worry: “Aren’t our jobs going to disappear?” “What kind of work can we tell our children to do so that they can survive and be happy?” When Elon Musk was asked something like this, he paused about twenty seconds and said: “As long as they can do what they love, it will be fine.” In the Western civilizational sphere, it can be surprisingly hard to say “I don’t know”. Maybe that really was his honest answer, or maybe there is simply no one who can truly foresee the future. When we asked earlier versions of Gemini and ChatGPT similar questions, a different answer came back: “The remaining domain may well be non-rational, non-logical.” The world may feel as if it is progressing incredibly fast — though that impression may depend on age and position. But even then, for machines to enter the non-logos domain without evasion will probably take: at least several years, more plausibly one or more decades, possibly several decades. If it takes several decades, our children may still be able to eat and live. Even if it happens in a few years, the result is not predetermined: A pessimistic scenario is a dystopia. An optimistic scenario is a kind of utopia. Perhaps computational systems will: embody some form of “benevolence”, worry about our work for us, or help reshape society in better directions. Even if they come to host their own non-rational, non-logical domain, it will likely be different from the human one. In that sense, maybe Fellini was right when he suggested that there is no such thing as something completely without meaning. There may be many possible paths. The task of contemporary thought and Buddhism is to give us good maps, whatever path we end up on.