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Showing posts with the label belief
"When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind" 
— Jiddu Krishnamurty
"It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda - but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it. Žižek's counsel here remains invaluable. 'If the concept of ideology is the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge', he argues,  'then today's society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way ... to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are sti...
Here is another one-dimensional way of thinking : A piece that never mentions the why (i.e. the geo-politics, the global and regional context, the so-called 'national-interest' cover or motive, etc) behind the belief, but focuses on the individual's neurons and the way that belief is held. Note also that Blair is a trained barrister by profession. His main skill is to know how to plead in court, using arguments and rhetoric not just knowledge of the legal system. Lawyers in general work within the system and they rarely challenge it. In fact they work to justify it most of the time.