7 ms·

It's a very tricky problem. My awareness of false consciousness is more from feminism. So what if a woman aspires to being nothing more than a good housewife?

It's a very tricky problem. My awareness of false consciousness is more from feminism. So what if a woman aspires to being nothing more than a good housewife? But what if she's been brought up in a culture where she has been told from early childhood that being a good housewife is all she every should aspire to? I don't think you can tell that person that their desires are wrong but you can point out what other options they have. It's up to them how they personally live. Voting and public life are different, however, because they have an impact on wider society. I think is then reasonable to critique others' decisions because those decisions impact us. On the big, high-level stuff there will always be disagreement about objectives, their relative importance, the best way to get there and so on. I don't think you can do too much there. But on more focused things you absolutely can question someone's rationale, their evidence base and how their vote or political activity will achieve their stated objectives. Take Brexit as an example. If you just don't want foreign people around then voting for Brexit probably makes sense. I disagree with your objective but there's a consistency to what you're doing. If you're voting for Brexit because you think the NHS needs more money then it's absolutely incumbent on you to explain what kind of economic impact you expect Brexit to have, how that'll affect tax receipts and the evidence for all of those expectations because I'm not aware of any informed analysis that says Brexit is consistent with increased NHS funding. It's not sufficient to just say "well they said on the bus that we give £350m a week to the EU and now that's going to go to the NHS". You're entitled to have whatever concerns you want, relate to your own life however you like. You're not entitled to have inaccurate beliefs based on a poor understanding of how things work.

neonate 7y ago
(I don't mean to be rude or argumentative, just interested.) Don't you think this is patronizing in the way I described above? By all means point out options, but if people decide not to choose those options, I don't see what entitles us to call that false consciousness. A caricature of this view might go as follows: "if you accept my political agenda then you have true consciousness and are entitled to your beliefs; if you do not then you have false consciousness and are not entitled to your beliefs." What is missing in that caricature?
- bambataa 7y ago
  I think it's the distinction between intrinsic beliefs and beliefs based on knowledge of the world. Maybe I didn't make the distinction clear enough. The former, though we may want to change them, can't usefully be called "wrong" but the latter can. False consciousness is then wrong beliefs deliberately propagated to achieve some end. What is missing from your caricature is whether the beliefs expressed make internal sense and fit with what we know about reality. Are you entitled to a belief that we shouldn't fund space programs because they're too expensive? Of course. Are you entitled to a belief that we shouldn't fund space programs because the world is flat? No. Another good UK example is government austerity over the last decade to reduce the deficit. The government gained popular support for it using analogies about household budgets that in fact aren't very applicable to government spending. This and other arguments got picked up and repeated by the media despite not being accepted by mainstream economists [1]. This led to a divergence between popular and academic understanding of the economy's strength and weaknesses. Given all of that, how much weight should be put on the economic beliefs of someone whose only macroeconomic knowledge is gleaned from the headlines? I would say that this a classic example of false consciousness. Of course, in politics and economics neutral knowledge is a tricky concept. That's why this is inherently discursive. My economics knowledge is mostly from reading a few introductory textbooks and reading blogs. Some economics expert might come along here and say I'm totally wrong on austerity and here's why. That's fine. I don't have an inherent right to be wrong. [1] https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2015/05/on-mediamacro.html https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2015/05/on-mediamacro.html
thu2111 7y ago
I think the way you portray Brexit is rather telling. There's actually a ton of very informed analysis that could be boiled down to "leaving the EU will result in increased NHS funding". Some of it is academic and wonkish, some of it is intuitive and working-class. But it's there. If you aren't aware of it that says more about how much you tried to expose yourself to such arguments, I think. A simple version goes like this: 1. The Eurozone is an economic backwater and Brussels a monolithic quasi-socialist archetype of Big Government. 2. So, growth in the EU is terrible and will remain terrible for a long time. The UK's economy is actually beating the other big mature economies in growth, even Germany, despite Brexit related uncertainty, so there are good reasons to believe the UK has it more right than the rest of Europe does, economically speaking. 3. But in the EU the Euro is sancrosanct, it cannot be questioned and EU institutions will do "whatever it takes", to use Monti's phrasing, in order to avoid it breaking up. 4. Inside the EU the UK is a sitting duck politically. It's unpopular with other member states because it's not populated by true-blue starry-eyed EU ideological believers and tends to argue for smaller government. But its political elite feels like it literally can't leave, which means its membership fees can be set arbitrarily high and money can be and should be extracted from its economy at will. 5. We can already see this happening with the entirely political and arbitrary "exit bill", a so-called bill that's written in no treaty or legal text anywhere. The EU demand it purely because they can and they know the psychologically weak and ideologically addled governmental classes will roll over and do whatever Brussels wants. We can also see it in the rapidly rising membership fees, which are tied to GDP and not any kind of actually delivered services. 6. Thus to Remain is to signal vast weakness to the Brussels conglomerate, who will then extract as much wealth from the country as possible. In case of Eurozone recession or bank collapse the UK will certainly be called on to fund a bailout, despite all the treaties saying this won't happen. Anyone who believes that hasn't studied the EU's history: it is a dead cert thing. 7. As a consequence, remaining in the EU will drain funding from all local government services, and especially the NHS, which will be hit by a double whammy of reduced UK government budgets due to the EU taking tax revenues and becoming a free hospital for all of Europe as a Eurozone financial crisis knocks out health insurers and freedom of movement ensures the NHS can't separate Brits from everyone else. What I outlined above is a scenario you seem to believe isn't supported by any "informed analysis", but it's not complex, or absurd, and you can read about the individual components in many informed analyses. Just search for it. Moreover, all the above is considered obvious by the working classes. Look at the Conservative election adverts that spell it out specifically - switch to an Australian style immigration system and there will be more money for the NHS because fewer low-earning immigrants will be using it. Obvious, innit?

neonate 7y ago

(I don't mean to be rude or argumentative, just interested.) Don't you think this is patronizing in the way I described above? By all means point out options, but if people decide not to choose those options, I don't see what entitles us to call that false consciousness. A caricature of this view might go as follows: "if you accept my political agenda then you have true consciousness and are entitled to your beliefs; if you do not then you have false consciousness and are not entitled to your beliefs." What is missing in that caricature?

bambataa 7y ago
I think it's the distinction between intrinsic beliefs and beliefs based on knowledge of the world. Maybe I didn't make the distinction clear enough. The former, though we may want to change them, can't usefully be called "wrong" but the latter can. False consciousness is then wrong beliefs deliberately propagated to achieve some end. What is missing from your caricature is whether the beliefs expressed make internal sense and fit with what we know about reality. Are you entitled to a belief that we shouldn't fund space programs because they're too expensive? Of course. Are you entitled to a belief that we shouldn't fund space programs because the world is flat? No. Another good UK example is government austerity over the last decade to reduce the deficit. The government gained popular support for it using analogies about household budgets that in fact aren't very applicable to government spending. This and other arguments got picked up and repeated by the media despite not being accepted by mainstream economists [1]. This led to a divergence between popular and academic understanding of the economy's strength and weaknesses. Given all of that, how much weight should be put on the economic beliefs of someone whose only macroeconomic knowledge is gleaned from the headlines? I would say that this a classic example of false consciousness. Of course, in politics and economics neutral knowledge is a tricky concept. That's why this is inherently discursive. My economics knowledge is mostly from reading a few introductory textbooks and reading blogs. Some economics expert might come along here and say I'm totally wrong on austerity and here's why. That's fine. I don't have an inherent right to be wrong. [1] https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2015/05/on-mediamacro.html https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2015/05/on-mediamacro.html

thu2111 7y ago

I think the way you portray Brexit is rather telling. There's actually a ton of very informed analysis that could be boiled down to "leaving the EU will result in increased NHS funding". Some of it is academic and wonkish, some of it is intuitive and working-class. But it's there. If you aren't aware of it that says more about how much you tried to expose yourself to such arguments, I think. A simple version goes like this: 1. The Eurozone is an economic backwater and Brussels a monolithic quasi-socialist archetype of Big Government. 2. So, growth in the EU is terrible and will remain terrible for a long time. The UK's economy is actually beating the other big mature economies in growth, even Germany, despite Brexit related uncertainty, so there are good reasons to believe the UK has it more right than the rest of Europe does, economically speaking. 3. But in the EU the Euro is sancrosanct, it cannot be questioned and EU institutions will do "whatever it takes", to use Monti's phrasing, in order to avoid it breaking up. 4. Inside the EU the UK is a sitting duck politically. It's unpopular with other member states because it's not populated by true-blue starry-eyed EU ideological believers and tends to argue for smaller government. But its political elite feels like it literally can't leave, which means its membership fees can be set arbitrarily high and money can be and should be extracted from its economy at will. 5. We can already see this happening with the entirely political and arbitrary "exit bill", a so-called bill that's written in no treaty or legal text anywhere. The EU demand it purely because they can and they know the psychologically weak and ideologically addled governmental classes will roll over and do whatever Brussels wants. We can also see it in the rapidly rising membership fees, which are tied to GDP and not any kind of actually delivered services. 6. Thus to Remain is to signal vast weakness to the Brussels conglomerate, who will then extract as much wealth from the country as possible. In case of Eurozone recession or bank collapse the UK will certainly be called on to fund a bailout, despite all the treaties saying this won't happen. Anyone who believes that hasn't studied the EU's history: it is a dead cert thing. 7. As a consequence, remaining in the EU will drain funding from all local government services, and especially the NHS, which will be hit by a double whammy of reduced UK government budgets due to the EU taking tax revenues and becoming a free hospital for all of Europe as a Eurozone financial crisis knocks out health insurers and freedom of movement ensures the NHS can't separate Brits from everyone else. What I outlined above is a scenario you seem to believe isn't supported by any "informed analysis", but it's not complex, or absurd, and you can read about the individual components in many informed analyses. Just search for it. Moreover, all the above is considered obvious by the working classes. Look at the Conservative election adverts that spell it out specifically - switch to an Australian style immigration system and there will be more money for the NHS because fewer low-earning immigrants will be using it. Obvious, innit?