The View From Nowhere
There is a peculiar sort of arrogance common among intellectuals, pundits, and keyboard radicals alikeâthe belief that they, unlike others, have escaped the great machinery of ideology. It is a flattering delusion. And like all flattering delusions, it is almost always false.
The average man may go through life unaware of how his values were shaped, or by whom. But the dangerous man is the one who believes himself immune to shaping. He imagines himself a free thinker while he quotes newspapers word for word. He condemns the herd while grazing beside it. And in his mind, only others are ideological. He merely sees the truth.
This is what I call the view from nowhere.
Every belief comes from somewhere. Every moral, political, religious, or aesthetic instinct was formed in a contextâsocial, historical, economic. To pretend otherwise is not honesty; it is performance. The performance of objectivity. Of transcendence. And it is, in many cases, more dangerous than ideology itself, for it gives cover to the worst dogmas by claiming they are not dogmas at all.
The man who says, âyou are brainwashed,â but believes himself washed clean, is not enlightenedâhe is blind to the bars of his own cell.
It was Marx who spoke of false consciousness, but the problem goes deeper than class. It is a condition of the modern soul: to be saturated with ideology, yet convinced of oneâs purity. This is what allows cruelty to wear the mask of reason, what allows empire to call itself peace, what allows injustice to pose as order.
There is no escaping the structure. The best one can do is to become aware of itâto drag it into the light, brick by brick. And even then, the structure is not undone. Only made visible.
To admit that you are shaped is not weaknessâit is the first act of resistance. To confess that your ideas are not born from a vacuum is not defeatâit is the beginning of intellectual honesty.
But to say âI see truth while you see only illusion,â to declare yourself the one awakened soul in a world of sleepersâthat is the true prison. And you built it yourself.
