Peter Emmerson

4. Social and personal control: certainty through absolute-truth beliefs – Obama and Atlee.

Our acceptance of this state of affairs is in part explained by resistance to change from those with invested interests in continuing to deploy ideals or absolute-truth beliefs.  Priests, philosophers and pure mathematicians (theometaphysicians) are three such prestigious figurations which have serious influence sufficient to undermine attempts to apply comparatively uncertain engineered approaches to figurational problems, especially where issues of significance to their established allies are concerned such as politics.  Absolute truth beliefs are tactical tools that form part of a strategy used by established figurations to control infiltration of outsiders into positions of influence – by definition an absolute truth is an ideological tool of domination resistant to all attempts at change: see my essay Why You Shouldn’t Believe Anything You’re Told.

However, where more personal aspects of human experience are concerned theometaphysicians and other established figurations have much less direct influence, especially over those outsiders with little social investment, whose meagre educational and/or financial resources leave them at a considerable social distance from established figurational thactivities and with minimal influence.  We can probably understand why someone schooled at Oxford University with a prestigious, highly paid job that facilitates property ownership would be well aware of and likely to deploy ancient absolute-truth beliefs when analysing life’s problems, political or otherwise.  But, it is less obvious as to why outsider figurations with little of what Bourdieu terms ‘culture capital’ should deploy absolute-truth beliefs?  Ideological conditioning can to some extent explain such penetration of these beliefs albeit mitigated by local culture as Gramsci and others have pointed out.  However, a need for ideological tools of domination is not a sole preserve of established figurations: even poor, uneducated people use absolute truths to dominate others, religious doctrine being a prime example.

Nonetheless, members of established and outsider figurations have another thing in common that can account for their receptivity to absolute-truth beliefs; they all need to feel in control of their lives.  When we hold a belief in an absolute-truth it increases our self-assurance sufficient to motivate us to exert our influence – in other words we feel in control of mundane situations and can live rather than merely exist.  To live in this sense is to thact assertively; to exist is to thact defensively.  Control is about self-assurance; in one sense domination is applying that control to others for our own benefit, that is, to retain control.  Maximum control is associated with absolute certainty – absolute certainty is energized and guaranteed by absolute-truth beliefs.  Such beliefs are useful for living at all levels whether we are tackling mundane problems or aiming to achieve high governmental office: listen to Barack Obama’s self-assured inaugural address of 2008 where in stating his impossible utopian vision of ‘change’, he liberally deploys absolute-truth beliefs.  His speech promised a more idealistic America where issues of injustice and inequality would be resolved – you could almost detect a feeling that Americans were about to enter a fabled ‘promised land’.  Such conviction pulsates with energy interdependent with absolute truth beliefs that facilitate sufficient charismatic self-assurance to vindicate running for presidential office in order to deploy serious influence.  Of course, political ideals by definition founder in their encounter with mundane political situations.  However, had Obama stated his case in a more realistic, engineered fashion, he would not have been so convincing and electable as he would not have been able to promise to deliver certainties.  Concomitantly, Obama was elected President on a wave of optimism that quickly dissipated when his team encountered mundane political situations that required thacting according to democratic checks and balances.   Unlike Obama’s people, Attlee’s figuration had a landslide victory to work with in 1945, which provided them with an opportunity to put their socialist absolute-truth beliefs into action and make big changes virtually unrestrained by political opposition.  Absolute-truth beliefs mandate us to thact with absolute certainty and conviction: by definition, we cannot be wrong.