Greetings, everyone
I am feeling a bit down these days and with these feelings come rather depressing images. When I put my mind to work on last week’s Inktober prompt nothing good came up.
The word hammer made me think about the verb “to hammer” and that led me to the figurative assumption according to which we can force notions, concept or ideas onto people or onto ourselves.
It is the case especially in totalitarian regimes, where the whole propaganda apparatus is put into operation to impose the state’s ideology. But this hammering also works, even if subtly, in allegedly democratic systems where people are allegedly free to pursue and hold their own views.
We like to think we are subjects, even though we may be subjected to invisible forces that drive our hands into hammering ourselves with ideas and impositions. Ideology is everywhere, even though we’d like to think that what drive us are ideas, good things; while the other is driven by ideology, bad things.
All –isms have good and bad things, but if hammered into people’s heads there is nothing good about any.