Ideological Realism & Scarcity of Imagination

I’m always fascinated and frustrated about the relationship of ideology to ‘realism. There are all kinds of ways for realism to manifest: race realism, communist realism, capitalist realism, religious realism, etc. But all of them share the same basic mentality.

The realism I’ve been most focused on lately is capitalist realism. But in our society it goes hand in hand with race realism. The two then give birth to a third realism: Social Darwinism.

Realism as an ideology forms a reality tunnel that declares nothing else is possible. This isn’t a passive lack of insight and vision. Rather, it is an active occluding of perception and an active suppression of alternatives. Realism taken to its extreme becomes dominant over all else.

In capitalist realism, scarcity is a central tenet of faith, the wall of ‘reality’ beyond which we don’t speak of, beyond which we don’t even know how to speak of. But if you step back for a moment you can see how much scarcity is self-imposed and so artificial.

Diamonds are a famous example as one company controls almost all the mines in the world and you know they are using some devious means to maintain that control. A less well known example is how the US Fed used hard money policies to suppress wages. Another less well known example is how Reagan used an artificially created Starve the Beast strategy by unnecessarily creating a permanent Federal debt.

This scarcity never applies to the rich. It is always the rich who are forcing scarcity onto the public. And it is the media and politicians owned by the rich who spread the scarcity message.

We live in the wealthiest country in the world. We have enough money to house, feed, educate and give healthcare to every American citizen. But our government chooses not to do so. Instead, the plutocrats choose corporate subsidies and the building of a military-prison-industrial complex.

A different kind of realism exists in China and another in North Korea. Those are more obviously oppressive, but in the big picture the US-style realism is more oppressive across the globe. In the end, it doesn’t really matter which ideological realism you choose. Oppression is oppression is oppression.

All forms of ideological realism have their preferred scarcity for that is just the other side of concentrated power. Behind any ideological realism, concentrated power will be found. Scarcity of all other things is determined by the scarcity of power, i.e., the hording of power.

The ultimate scarcity, though, that this leads to is a scarcity of freedom and imagination, the disempowerment of mind. To imagine other possibilities is to that extent to make yourself free. It is the force of vision that is behind any genuine claim to freedom. There is no greater revolutionary act.