Unfortunately we can't be head empty no thoughts :(

 Marx believed that ideology was what maintained social organization and that the only way to combat ideology was to change our material conditions. Marx believed that this change would come in the form of the communist revolution. Today many use Marx’s ideas about ideology to argue in favor of passivity. They believe (this belief I will not comment on the correctness of) that, according to the state of the world today, the communist revolution will never come i.e our material conditions will never change, and as a result ideology will always be present in society. As a result, they believe that it will never be possible to combat social inequality and that apathy and passivity are valid ways of responding to this reality.

Such a mindset is incredibly dangerous but is unfortunately held by many people today. Hence, this is why accounts like Professor Toole’s and Tommy Shelby’s are incredibly important. Shelby writes about the capacity of ideology-critique to understand and resist forms of oppression. He believes that ideology critique allows us to “expel social illusions” and “empower those in their grip to change the oppressive social conditions that make ideology necessary.” By criticizing the system and exposing the episteme defects, the oppressive structures that ideology conceals will finally be revealed, and the oppressed can better understand the nature of their oppression and pursue action to combat the oppressive system.

These ideas remind me a lot about “critical consciousness,” an idea articulated by Brazilian pedagogue and educational theorist Paulo Freire and was also not so coincidentally grounded in post-Marxist critical theory. Critical consciousness is meant to be used as a way for the oppressed to fight back against the “Culture of Silence,” where marginalized people internalize the negative images of themselves created by their oppressors. Freire believed that liberating marginalized people from the violence caused by the negative images would cause them to achieve critical consciousness. In his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (10/10 would recommend read) Freire notes how the oppressed can regain their humanity from the dominant classes by acquiring knowledge about the nature of their oppression and then seeking liberation by applying said knowledge and finding pathways for recourse to compensate for their oppressive material conditions.

Toole, in my view, seems to outline an idea very similar to critical consciousness but one that also allows for the oppressor to realize the systems they are reinforcing and the ways they can fight against them. Toole seems to argue that the oppressors do not understand the perspective of the oppressed, and as a result, cannot fathom how the societal structure is experienced by them. By utilizing standpoint epistemology, the oppressors have a way to combat the ideology they reinforce in the status quo.

In the end, both Toole and Shelby seem to go in line with Freire. All three of them provide powerful arguments against passivity and apathy. We cannot accept the status quo as it is. Ideology is pervasive, but as the aforementioned thinkers stated, there are ways we can combat it and find liberation. 

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