Ideology is a parasite on religious substructures. A religious narrative has a particular set of characteristics. It's very balanced. So for example there's the feminist idea of the patriarchy. Well the religious idea of society has a patriarchal notion built into it. That would be the dying king. The once great dying king. In a religious story, there's the natural world, the chaotic world - there's a positive element and a negative element. Then there's the social world - there's the wise king and the tyrannical king. Then there's the individual world - that's the adversary and the hero. There's always a positive and a negative at each level. And it stops it from being an over simplification.
Jordan PetersonRelated topics
adversary built chaotic dying element example great hero idea ideology individual king level narrative natural negative notion once parasite particular patriarchy positive religious set simplification social society story well wise world feminist stopsRelated quotes
Forget the 18th century, the 19th century, even at the birth of the 20th century. Here's my favorite example, here: 1928, my hero, Walt Disney, created this extraordinary work, the birth of Mickey Mouse in the form of Steamboat Willie. But what you probably don't recognize about Steamboat Willie and his emergence into Mickey Mouse is that in 1928, Walt Disney, to use the language of the Disney Corporation today, "stole" Willie from Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill."
It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928 - no 14 years - just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did to produce the Disney empire.
Lawrence Lessig
...what the freedom is that I love, and that to which I think all men intitled. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish Liberty. As if every Man was to regulate the whole of his Conduct by his own will. The Liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which Liberty is secured by the equality of Restraint; A Constitution of things in which the liberty of no one Man, and no body of Men and no Number of men, can find Means to trespass on the liberty of any Person, or any description of Persons in the Society. This kind of liberty is indeed but another name for Justice, as ascertained by wise Laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions.
Edmund Burke
How do things stand, now, if the subject contains a large element of pathos?... Consider such an interesting subject as the scene taking place around the bed of a dying woman, for example; seize and render that ensemble by photography, if that is possible [photography was a very recent invention in Paris ca. 1853, a. o. by the photographer Nadar ]: it will be falsified in a thousand ways. The reason is that, according to the degree of your imagination, the subject will appear to you more or less beautiful, you will be more or less the poet in that scene in which you are an actor; you see only what is interesting, whereas the instrument puts in everything.
Eugène Delacroix
It has become obvious to the new architect that by virtue of his work he is taking an active part in the building of a new world. For us the work of an artist has no value 'as such'; it does not represent an end in itself; it has no intrinsic beauty. The value of a work of art is determined by its relationship to the community.. .The artist, or the creative worker, invents nothing; there is no such thing as divine inspiration. Thus we understand by the term 'reconstruction' the conquest of the unresolved, of the 'mysterious,' and the chaotic. In our [Russian] architecture, as in our entire life, we are striving to create a social order, i.e., to raise the instinctive to a conscious level.
El Lissitsky
It would be quite false to say that competition is the only relation that obtains between species. Mutual dependence is in general quite as important. Each kind exists within an ecosystem, and needs the others to keep the system going. Thus, grazing animals on the African plains co-exist because each specializes in eating some particular kind of plant, and needs the others to keep the whole pasture at a balanced level. They depend, too, on each other's specialized capacities to give warning of danger. ... each also depends for survival on innumerable others, such as the insects which pollinate the plants, the fauna of their intestines and of course their predators. It is unthinkable that any species should be an island.
Mary Midgley
