We are a bunch of monkeys that climbed to the summit of a mountain and in our wonder, gaze out into the vast sea of fog below us, thinking that it is the floor.

Modern society only understands where we are and does not care how we got there. We don't live in the world as it exists anymore, we live in a model of the world. Or even, a model of a model of a model of a world, in which the virtual models and symbols whose intent was the representation of real things have entirely replaced real experiences to the point that the models themselves dictate reality rather than reality dictating the model.

For instance, we don't look at nature as the natural state of things. We might say we do on paper, but we don't in reality. We look at the construct of civilization, living in a city or a suburb, as the natural and normal state of things, and view nature as the aberration. Cities and civilization are an artificially constructed bubble we have gradually built up to protect humans from the harshness of nature. Now, rather than view the natural world as a thing we expand into, we put the natural world into artificially constructed bubbles to as a means to "preserve" it.

Let's go through a couple other examples.

Most people here probably don't really know very much about meat. You know on some level that beef comes from a cow, of course. But you don't really know anything about it. Your entire experience of meat is purchasing a plastic wrapped shape in a supermarket. You never knew or raised the animal, bolted its head, drained it of blood, and cut it into sections, and ground it up into a hamburger patty. You likewise also are not at all familiar with the people who make this all possible. The best you have experienced of any of this is probably just reading a text on the subject, or perhaps seeing some gruesome factory farming video sponsored by a vegan group. The actual effort and difficulty involved in raising a herd of animals to convert into meat is completely obscured and all the insight you generally get into it is an incredibly abstract price. The only thing you have direct experience with is eating (or perhaps cooking) the artificial construct that is a hamburger, or a steak, or a sausage, and so society for the most part only views meat in the vacuum of that entirely artificial experience that is divorced of anything that happens within the process.

This sort of thing pretty much permeates the entirety of modern living.

Money is a model by which we measure demand and scarcity of products and labor, compressing and contorting it into a singular quantifiable value. Money was just a matter of convenience we passed around so that we could obtain a real good without the difficulty associated with the direct exchange of real items and services; those are what we cared about and money was just the abstraction point which we used to smooth and facilitate that. But money is now and end in of itself, which people pursuit, and define their entire lives by, rather than by definition of what they offer or what they produce in real terms for other people.

Now, you exchange completely abstract and mostly insignificant divisions of ownership in a company – which you have no real part in running or operating - with other people you never care to know or see in hopes that the number attached to these divisions increases, so that you may later exchange your abstract division of ownership in a company increase an abstract number in an abstract accounting entity that ultimately decides the range and quantity of goods that you may obtain. Some people will attempt to engineer complex mathematical and statistical models to predict whether these abstract units of ownership will rise or fall with no actual interest in what any of these companies or their services actually represent, whether there will be control, or how they derive their profits. The entire system, once an abstraction meant to solve a problem with an impactful purpose, becomes an abstraction that is meant to facilitate another abstraction.

There is no real notion of what labor or toil goes into making the shirt on your back. You see the shirt, and you see a price. That's it. Everything that got it to where it is may as well have never happened. You don't really care about any step of the process, who financed it, or who designed it. The people who finance and designed the shirt don't even know nor care either. All they see is something someone else will buy for more abstract units than they had to pay to get it to work. But no matter if you bring this up, they will not understand or care in a meaningful way as their understanding of process is entirely virtual; compassion is just another thing to quantify into their balance sheets.

The Generation and Degeneration of Innovation

During the industrial revolution we experienced an incredible surge in the amount of technology available to us, with possibly the most remarkable tangible changes belonging to the years of 1900-1970, where technological progress and mechanization was so rapid the way of life one generation was born with was completely unrecognizable by the time of their death; we went from steam engines and horse drawn carriages to atomic power and space exploration. After industrialization completed, we began to abstract at an increasingly rapid pace, to the point that earlier generations can no longer understand how to use the technologies that they originally developed, because they have evolved so rapidly in such different directions from the point they once occupied.

We now essentially live on the surface of a planet of abstractions which were once obviously abstractions meant to originally facilitate some useful thing that we couldn't do before. As people who built these abstractions died the original purpose of these things slowly became lost. The next generations that were born lived within these artificial constructs as their new reality, and treated them as if they were things always there, deriving new abstractions atop these previous abstractions, which the generation after them have taken for granted, and so on.

The generation that grew up with television makes television part of their reality. That is to say, the viewer no longer views a television show as a representation of what happens in real life. Rather, the viewer judges their real life in relation to what happens on television. As we isolate ourselves from each other, these false relationships become more real to us than the things that they were meant to phantastically represent. People begin to think cops work like they do on Law and Order, that they have the technology of CSI. People begin to think of the dynamics of human relationships in terms of romantic comedies or sitcoms, and expect love to awkwardly fall into their lap, and that no matter what happens good always wins, and everything will be okay in the end.

When we lose the purpose and intent of abstraction we can sometimes come up with novel and interesting ways of doing things, but we often also end up in a dangerous position of ignorance that leaves us in a worse place than we were before.

The Ideology of Abstraction

There are things we know we know. There are things we know we do not know. There are things we don't know we don't know. But perhaps the most interesting category, are things we do not know we know. How is that possible? By the very process which we have outlined above.

The things that we do not know we know, are the artificial underpinnings of the world around us that we implicitly do not question, because as we are born into it, and they have essentially formed a new kind of reality that we do not really understand how to live without. This is Ideology. I mean that in the most general sense of the word: these are a collective set of ideas which pepper our idea of how things should work, incoherently developed across the entirety of society and subscribed to unconsciously and without question. Most people are so steeped within the confines of Ideology that they would find to even question these ideas to be completely preposterous.

Without really understanding or articulating it, we "know" that we have to go to college, get a job, and find a middling career doing something we don't really care about, but we don't really consider this life something to be questioned. We "know" we're supposed to work 1 career and retire at 60. We "know" that the state is there to protect our freedoms and build our roads. We "know" money has real value. We "know" industrial farming practices are sustainable and we'll always find a way to continue it. We "know" what we want to consume will never do us wrong and that the market will always be able to provide it. We "know" that we should be ashamed of our deviancy and promiscuity, and we "know" that we should be ashamed for not being sexual enough. We "know" democracy is representative of the will of the people. We "know" technological progress is exponential and we'll always find a solution to any problem we face.

It does not ultimately matter how contradictory Ideology ultimately is in practice or in theory. The problems with Ideology are always rationalized away, because nobody willed themselves into Ideology, it simply just "happened". Some really don't believe in it, but play along with it anyway, giving Ideology all the same power. Ideology shapes the landscape of acceptable ideas. Anyone who questions an aspect of Ideology, is considered a dangerous radical if someone thinks they can implement a better society and a loon/crank if they simply just talk about it. In either case their ideas are dismissed by the public at large, because they are convinced how things are, are just "reality" or how "the real world" works, despite the fact that the radical is in fact questioning the very underpinnings of "the real world", that artificial construct that we have built ourselves upon.

(Now some radicals are, of course, just babbling morons foaming at the mouth about magical hermetic circles and planetary alignments. They question the unquestionable Ideology only to form their own unquestionable dogma. Not every idea makes sense, and it's foolish to abandon empiricism and rational thought for the sake of bashing the trapping of modern Ideology.)

Moving forward

Ideology can only truly be challenged by rational, individual discourse. We have to think for ourselves and constantly question whether what we are collectively doing makes sense. Whether we can ever truly break out of, or "rise above" Ideology outside of small circles for brief instances of time is doubtful to me. I would like to be wrong, but the momentum of our collective actions is difficult to break. Most people have things that they aren't willing to challenge or question. We must be able to break through as many of these invisible and false social barriers as possible.