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“If mass consciousness exists at all, it must be empirically “present,” itself a thing obvious to those who participate in it, or, at least, empirically manifested in the language which communicates it.” (McGee, 4)
The Ideograph is a word-idea that is not defined clearly, but rather exists as a set of relationships, associations, and significations. (yes, I know you could argue that all words are ideographs, but don’t be obtuse). These terms represent power and mass consciousness, a consciousness manifested in the ambiguity of the term. (4)
An ideograph is an ordinary language term found in political discourse. It is a high-order abstraction representing collective commitment to a particular but equivocal and ill-defined normative goal. It warrants the use of power, excuses behavior and belief which might otherwise be perceived as eccentric or antisocial and guides behavior and belief into channels easily recognized by a community as acceptable and laudable.” (15)
An Ideograph is a word that exists as an object separate from its connotative or denotative meaning: the facets of a word that exist in a zero-sum political/social/cultural sphere. Ideographs make up “a vocabulary of concepts that function as guides, warrants, reasons, or excuses for behavior and belief” (6) Think about how the following words tend to be used in conversations:
In most conversations, it doesn’t matter what these terms mean academically, socially, historically, or culturally, it matters what sets of loosely defined allegiances they represent. We use these words as Ideographs, not as ideas.
Ideographs are base assumptions of association, ideas that exist by stereotype and connection, not reason.
“[T]hey signify and ‘contain’ a unique ideological commitment; further, they presumptuously suggest that each member of a community will see as a gestalt every complex nuance in them. What ‘rule of law’ means is the series of propositions, all of them, that could be manufactured to justify a Whig/Liberal order. Ideographs are one-term sums of an orientation, the species of ‘God’ or ‘Ultimate’ term that will be used to symbolize the line of argument the meanest sort of individual would pursue, if that individual had the dialectical skills of philosophers, as a defense of personal stake in and commitment to the society. Nor is one permitted to question the fundamental logic of ideographs: Everyone is conditioned to think of ‘the rule of law’ as a logical commitment just as one is taught to think that ‘186,000 miles per second’ is an accurate empirical description of the speed of light even though few can work the experiments or do the mathematics to prove it. . . The important fact about ideographs is that they exist in real discourse, functioning clearly and evidently as agents of political consciousness. They are not invented by observers; they come to be as a part of the real lives of the people whose motives they articulate (7)”
Ideographs are nearly impossible to define because their definition is not logical or categorical, but rather exists as a framing, non-reasoned object. McGee mentions Liberty, Rule of Law, Equality, as examples of Ideographs, as these terms don’t exactly have concrete, clear definitions, but are bundles of associations that exist to represent a framework of thought, rather than a single line of reasoning. You can’t see “Liberty.” You can’t even really understand what it means, when it is used Ideographically. There may be academic definitions, or denotative definitions, that can help you cement what this term means, but they lose all meaning when face to face with the real deal.
“In effect, ideograph’s-language imperatives which hinder and perhaps make impossible ‘pure thought’--are bound within the culture which they define. We can characterize an ideograph, say what it has meant and does mean as a usage, and some of us may be able to achieve an imaginary state of withdrawal from community long enough to speculate as to what ideographs ought to mean in the best possible worlds; but the very nature of language forces us to keep the two operations separate: So, for example, the ‘idea’ of ‘liberty’ may be the subject of philosophical speculation, but philosophers can never be certain that they themselves or their readers understand a ‘pure’ meaning unpolluted by historical, ideographic usages.” (9)
The Ideograph is a means of social control which is “control over consciousness, the a priori influence that learned predispositions hold over human agents who play the roles of ‘power’ and ‘people’ in a given transaction.” (5-6)
A trouble we all run into, is that Ideographs are by nature sloppy. McGee identifies how Ideographs come out of collective consciousness, communal thought, rather than individual reasoning.
Groups are Ideograph machines.
If you spend some time inside of an internet community you are an outsider to, you will notice how quickly you find sweeping categorizations of all of humanity that have little to no bearing in reality. Chad/Virgin, Alpha/Beta/Gamma/Sigma, Right-Clicker Mentality/NFT Curator, Cringe/Based, NIMBYs/YIMBYs, Fascist/Anti-Fascist, etc. Ideographic construction, and thus a reconstruction of reality, is the bread and butter of Internet discourse. A heavy reliance on Ideographs for thought creates a world of opposition between amorphous ideographs, battling over association, but not over what is or even should be.
Indeed, when we encounter Ideographs, even those created as bogeymen, it is tempting to align ourselves for or against them. If you say everyone is an MCU or DCEU stan, you will inevitably sort yourself into one or the other. We are obsessed with finding ideographs we love (hate), and cementing ourselves to their amorphous alignment. We hate what those we love, hate.
We love what those we hate, hate. We define ourselves oppositionally against hated ideographs, forming our own identities in a place of negation against something that barely exists.
My fear, a deep and abiding fear, is that in our hyper communal age of electrate rhetoric carefully filtered into algorithmically sorted communities, we are rapidly developing meaningless and destructive Ideographs out of ideas that don’t meaningfully exist, and then, because of Ironic Conversion, we will them into existence. We are defining ourselves by our own Ideographs, or more frequently, we are defining ourselves against Ideographs that we have communally constructed, and then creating the space necessary for the Ideographs to be used for the self-definition of others.
The grim reality is that while our internet discourse can be described as “imagining a guy, tricking yourself into believing that guy exists and getting mad at him" there is an additional step: We create that guy with our hatred.
We are summoning demonic kingdoms by hating them enough to make them real, and then forming our own diabolical weapons to defeat them.