In a contest between action and ideology, which wins? If you say they are not the same, you are correct. Action isn’t ideological. And ideology isn’t action. So how can they match up? “Action Versus Ideology?” Action represents Americanism. Ideology represents everything else. Americanism isn’t ideological. Everything else is. That’s how we match these two up. Let’s see who wins.
Americanism as I define it, consists of three parts: spiritual living, the life guiding principles of freedom, and simple competence. Those are the pillars of Americanism, as I define it. The conclusive accomplishment of Americanism is simple competence. Each part builds into the next. None of these parts are ideological, they deal with how things are, not how they are supposed to be.
Part one, Spiritual Living recognizes “knowledge” as an emotion, the emotion of religion. “Knowledge” is the emotion of certainty and entitlement. Which is why, as Americans, we cognitively recognize that we don’t know anything. Because we only have an experience and understanding of things, which grows with experience and reflection. Certainty and entitlement are nonsensical when living from experience and understanding. The emotion of knowledge is childish, like hope, and we’ve out grown it.
The essence of spirituality is that reality is mostly beyond our ability to see and understand, thus not certain nor entitled. Both of which are true. This is why Americanism starts with spiritual living. Our faith is in God, not our “knowledge” of God.
Spirituality develops from living, we are not born with it, and most people never make it past ego. Spirituality is super-natural, not instinctually natural, like ego (see below).
Life itself is a super-natural state of existence, an organization of empirical matter. Empirical matter is natural; life is super-natural. It is no stretch to think of spirituality and life as super-natures arising from ego and empirical matter. But this is more than a bit tangential. Just remember, the benefit of spiritual living is our comfort, practice and power in living without certainty.
Part two, the life guiding principles of freedom are: value>need>responsibility>liberty>action>results>satisfaction. This is my definition of freedom, freedom being an ethic, not any one thing. With this relational understanding of things (reality), we are better able to organize and understand life. Coupled with spiritual living, these first two parts combine to accomplish our third part, simple competence.
Part three, simple competence is the eventual outcome of Americanism, the ability to pursue what we care about, productively, sustainably. Which now gets us back to the title of this article: Action Versus Ideology.
Action.
From our values needs arise, and we accept the responsibility of meeting those needs. We are now at liberty to act. But what to do? This is where Americanism is so utterly powerful. We are at ease with not knowing anything. There are no doubts because there are no certainties. So in starting something for the first time, we learn what we can from language, but really, learn mostly from working on the objective. We are naturally entrepreneurial.
What doesn’t happen is a delusion of “This is how it is, so A begets B!” This doesn’t happen because our experience and understanding are wise to the fallacies of knowledge. Even things we’ve done many times, we know that each time is the first time, not the last time. (That probably doesn’t make sense at first read. So read it again. Ask in the comments if you want an explanation.) And with practice, we simplify our competence, expand our artfulness, and enjoy every bit of it.
The job defines the work that must be done, not “foresight.”
What we find wrong with the world is that we did not know quite right, what to do to achieve what we sought to do, and having learned from doing, we improve and iterate until accomplished.
Ideology.
From ideology, which is ego driven, ego driven ideologists are determined and self-justified to make things right. From the perspective of an ego driven ideologist, knowledge is power. (I’m guilty of coining this myself, back in the early nineteen nineties, and I was wrong, importantly so. George Bush Jr. got a hold of it, and the rest is infamy.)
We’re going to repeat this. Knowledge isn’t power, it is the emotion of certainty and entitlement. Knowledge is the emotion of religion.
We are fragile mortal short lived creatures, animals, neurobiological compute faculties. So we are afraid and cling to delusion in place of reality, because we are fragile mortal short lived creatures, animals, neurobiological compute faculties. We presume an emotional status of immortal godhood, courtesy of our ego, what we call BIOS in computer science.
God, by way of nature, gives us a basic input/output system (BIOS) that boots us into life. This system is ego. All mentally functioning creatures have it. Ego is a basic gender biased instinctual set of dispositions (instruction set), that are validated by reproductive survival. Ego is natural. Ego is set. We all start with ego; few of us grow beyond it, into super-natural living, spiritual living. (As Americans, we have to.)
Ideology is just stuff we make up to explain things, or set as a goal, how we want things to be. Mind you, reality is what it is, regardless of what we think it is, or want it to be. Ideology is fiction, fiction culture. Ideology works with the emotion of knowledge, and the godhood emotion of ego, to produce the man-beast (ego says: Man-God!) of historical disfunction. Best known as non-Americans.
Ideology really shows its ass too, when you consider “management’s” attitude towards craft. The idea that craft doesn’t know what they’re doing, and management does, even though craft is what actually does the work, and management actually does nothing—at best. Look at this so called reform of law enforcement. Shit for brains people (I’m being nice here.) telling the police how to police. Like they fucking know. What they do is fuck shit up, and continue to blame the police for it. They fuck shit up, and the people continue to blame the police for it. All of it is bullshit. All of it is ideological.
What ego driven ideology finds wrong with the world is that the world is not conforming to its judgment of fairness and correct. The shoulds and should nots of life. Ego driven ideology justifies warring on reality and all of existence to “make it better.” Just ask Karen. 🙂
The contrast of action versus ideology.
- Americanism combines spiritual living with the life guiding principles of freedom and simple competence as the arbiter of correct, which makes for reliable, adaptable, sustainable success, wealth and happiness. We don’t blame, we learn. Americans are do-ers.
- Ego driven ideology combines the emotion of knowledge (religion), the godhood of ego, and the decided assurance of fiction culture, which makes for certainty, entitlement, chaos, conflict, failure, blame and rage. They don’t learn, they steal. Ego driven ideologists are don’t-ers.
Do-ers do, and produce. Don’t-ers scheme, watch, fail and complain. Any questions?
Action wins! Boo Ideology, you suck!
Be American. Stay American.
David Weeks, Information Developer, Tampa, Florida. God love us.