what is the simplest possible political ideology you can think of?
perhaps a lot of people will point to First-World Liberal republicanism, because "to do liberal democracy you only really need to replace monarchy with representatives". perhaps some Kropotkinists will crop up with objections to that statement, calling Liberalism an over-bloated mess and claiming that "really, everything would be much easier if we formed people into self-contained anarchies". perhaps for some people whose minds work a little bit differently, they will instead be inclined to see Marxism-Leninism as the actual simplest ideology because "whenever anyone actually tries it, everything else requires such a complicated set of steps to actually get people organized". perhaps somewhere in some far corner of Britain you will find somebody claiming Trotskyism is really the simplest ideology of them all, because they have never understood why everybody has to divide into these arbitrary "nation-state" things or join into some formal "Communist bloc" instead of just forming into a single global proletariat. perhaps in about every other town in the United States you will run into a very tired individual who for the past five or ten years has been studying the United States through either amateur or professional forms of sociology and today feels like giving you the thought that fascism is the simplest possible political ideology because "there's nothing simpler than forming an ideology that's just the people you like against the people you hate".
well, what if you were to learn that there was a political ideology out there that was simpler than any of these things? simpler than Liberal republicanism. simpler than any form of Anarchism. simpler than Marxism, even though most things already are. simpler than right-wing nationalism. simpler than right-Liberal business theory. simpler than queer theory. simpler than a politically non-denominational anti-racism lecture. simpler than a local Christian church's improperly provided political advice. simpler than a self-help book. simpler than listening to Fox News. simpler than the often unnecessarily-convoluted systems you find within a typical Young-Adult dystopia book.
how would you react if you learned that there was an ideology best described as "PeopleJustLinkTogetherAndFormASocietyism"? how would you feel to know that not just some people, but probably _most people around you_, do not believe in any of the more complex ideologies listed above that came to be after particular courses of history, and instead believe in their own seemingly novel yet in actuality rather ancient theory of all politics, economics, and society as one great amorphous mass of "PeopleJustLiveTheirLiveAndExisticists"?
from all the observable evidence, it would appear to be the case that this really is the world's largest political theory. although its own principles to some extent prevented any of its adherents from discovering that they believed it, it has had its own name since at least 1946. [*bab] the proper name of this social-political-economic theory is Existentialism, or Existentialism-Structuralism. it is the theory that all forms of society and all possible forms of the existence of a human individual are best explained by simply describing the characteristics of sheer material and conscious existence themselves.
existentialism has existed long before it was first given its name in the lowercase, potentially since hundreds of years ago. it has also existed quite consistently _after_ it was named, behind any number of supposedly-separate philosophies outwardly bearing other names.
taken together, it will be argued in this text that all these seemingly separate philosophies actually constitute a single _Existentialist-Structuralist tradition_, with all of the later proposed "periods" of the tradition taking the core concepts of early existentialism as it was formally named and crystallized in 1940s Europe and building on this specific new modern form of Existentialism to create an increasingly more socially-relevant and elaborate incarnation of the overall Existentialist framework.
the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition taken entirely by itself is neutral. if something is truly believed by almost everybody from good people to bad people and from the powerful to the powerless across every country and all or most ethnic groups in existence today, can that thing really be a problem in the sense of immediacy or imminent danger to the human species? for the most part it cannot. if something is believed by all humanity then a nuanced approach is needed to figure out in what situations that thing should or should not be allowed to manifest and in what specific situations that thing could eventually pose a threat.
if it were the case that 80% of all people on earth believed in capitalism, then it would never be sufficient to simply tell all those people to stop believing in capitalism; if everybody believes in or performs capitalism then people must figure out how to transition everyone out of capitalism from within the conditions of capitalism. likewise, if it were the case that 80% of people on earth believed in either religion, magic ritual, or the general existence of the supernatural, it would not be enough to tell them these things are materially false as much as to prove to them that they can _materially survive_ without these things and that it is possible to build a world where other more mundane things successfully take their place. it may be somewhat more objectionable to people to realize that if 80% of people on earth believed in some form of prejudice or bigotry then everyone who does not have each of those prejudices cannot simply snap their fingers or give a lecture to make all prejudice vanish and ultimately has to unify people _from within the conditions of_ the existence of all of those prejudices. but given all of the above things, it should become obvious that if there is a social-political-economic theory that _nearly everybody believes_ but is posing a problem, it will not be enough to simply show people better theories, and they will most likely only abandon the faulty theory when it has been proven to them they will survive better if they do abandon it, or better yet, that if they continue to believe nearly the same theory but merely apply a framework which can make all theories successful to fix it, they can avoid the greatest problems of the old uncorrected theory and end up with some sort of new viable theory just as easily. survival is the key — almost all matters of harmful versus beneficial ideologies center around the problem of which forms of cooperation and non-cooperation truly represent the most effective ways for particular local groups of human beings to survive. if any theory fails to deliver on the survival of any particular group of people, it is almost guaranteed that cooperation will break apart and some form of bigotry will result. really, there is scarcely any form of prejudice which does not trace back to complaints about survival. this curious observation gains a great amount of relevance as we come to study each period of the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition and see that it anchors most of everything it has to say about delivering us all from prejudice and tyranny _around_ the biological, surviving individual, otherwise known as "the subject". can such a form of philosophy possibly deliver us from anything, or thanks to its reverence for the precise point where conflict and reaction emerge from, is it always poised to swivel around and attack itself?
along with showing some of the dangers of the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition, and explaining some number of possible environmental factors its modern incarnation appears to have sprung from, this text will gradually demonstrate proposed replacements for every single part of it. you think you need early-existentialism, the study of individual experience and meaning? meet entropicism, the study of material function and tenacious persistence. captivated by poststructuralism, the study of constant symbolic deconstruction? meet meta-ontology, the study of how all forms of studying things study things. convinced that schizoanalysis is the only reasonable model of movements? when you meet meta-Marxism, you'll be questioning how you ever went without questioning that.
every single period of the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition, including every period you never wanted to believe was part of it, has an alternative. every one of these alternatives can be grounded in the methods of historical materialism, and the study known until now as dialectical materialism. by turning around historical materialism on itself, as well as every study that claims to be able to filter the rest of the world through itself, we ultimately end up with the only thing that really can interpret everything else — meta-Marxist metaphilosophy — and its underlying reflexive and recursive theory-correcting framework of _postification_.
if all of that sounds horribly esoteric, don't worry. philosophy is currently stuck in a kind of nightmare period thanks to the seemingly-unending spiral of abstractions of abstractions created by various periods of Existentialism. the moment we properly postify Existentialism into its Materialist counterparts, everything becomes possible to put in more everyday language and all of the complete incomprehensible philosophical spaghetti falls away. philosophy can make sense again. unfortunately, in order to get there, we do need to go to some amount of effort to actually untangle all the nonsensical discussions happening in academic Existentialism at a level of analysis which is capable of properly showing why none of them make any sense. the meta-Marxist framework of _postification_ and _meta-ontology_ will give us the tools we need to untangle all of these knots so successfully we can eventually get away with cutting them.
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[*bab] _Existentialism is a humanism_: Sartre 1946. [*BAB]
[*BAB] _Being and Becoming_
=> 5.1r/1900/1718568493 n. Nietzche's writing contains nasty errors ; nietzsche
=> 4.3r/4031/1694682922 n. formation of bonds as agreement ; disagree
; the entry where every political ideology is actually about "I don't think so"
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