Domination and Reputation Management

Since Marx, many “radical” intellectuals have endorsed some version of “the dominant ideology thesis”. Very roughly, this states that popular belief systems (“ideologies”) function to justify, and so support, exploitative and oppressive social arrangements.

These “system-justifying” ideologies are fairly transparent in some cases. It doesn’t take a sophisticated critical theorist to realise that the “divine right of kings” is well-designed to legitimise a specific mode of power. The same is true of the rationalisations that have accompanied slavery (“natural slaves”), imperialism (“the white man’s burden”), caste-based hierarchies (“your birth reflects your karma”), and the exclusion of women from positions of status and influence (“too hysterical and child-brained”).

However, many intellectuals have argued that system-justifying ideologies are pervasive even within liberal democracies characterised by formal equality among citizens. Famously, Marx and many later generations of Marxists have framed positive evaluations of capitalism as sinister distortions functioning to mask its inherently exploitative nature. And over the past century, many intellectuals have applied similar analyses to belief systems or “discourses” alleged to legitimise and uphold other oppressive systems like white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, and heteronormativity.

In such analyses, popular ideologies do not merely happen to obscure or hide oppression and exploitation. They emerge and proliferate for that reason. By embracing delusions that misrepresent reality, the very people victimised by a social order come to support and sustain it. Infected by “false consciousness”, their misunderstandings make them consent to their own victimisation. If they saw the world clearly—if they achieved the true consciousness of the radical activist or scholar—the entire system would collapse. And so ideologies are engineered to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Much has been written about this kind of story, some of it highly critical.

Some complain that it lacks a plausible mechanism. If belief systems function to justify systems of oppression, how do they acquire this function? Who, or what, designs them? It seems far-fetched to think that white, “cis”, heterosexual, able-bodied, property-owning men deliberately conspire to spread system-justifying propaganda. I missed the invitation to that meeting. But if that isn’t the mechanism, then what is, exactly? Marx speculated that capitalism is inherently deceptive, its exploitative relations presenting themselves as “free” exchange to naïve perception, but the arguments have not been very persuasive to anybody but Marxists.

Other critics observe that oppression can be sustained for reasons that