Domination and Reputation Management

How ideologies of liberation become tools of oppression

Photo by Moises Gonzalez on Unsplash

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 have nothing to do with ignorance or ideological falsehoods. A clear-eyed appreciation of one’s oppression doesn’t make it easy to overthrow. Oppressive institutions come with sophisticated mechanisms of social control, and rebels confront thorny collective action problems. For example, even if Marxists are correct that workers would benefit from overthrowing capitalism, individual workers benefit even more from letting others do the risky work of revolution for them. And even if women would benefit from eliminating oppressive beauty standards, individual women benefit even more from using cosmetics to ascend the local beauty hierarchy.

These objections provide important correctives to naïve formulations of the dominant ideology thesis, but they are not fatal. One needn’t posit a deliberate conspiracy to explain how popular belief systems can become biased by the interests of extractive elites, and the fact that mundane incentive problems can sustain oppression doesn’t mean that ideological mystification plays no role.

In this essay, I will offer a different critique. After detailing what I think the theory of “system-justifying” ideologies gets right, I will argue that it misdiagnoses the primary function of such belief systems, which is to convince oppressors, not the oppressed. To maintain reputations as friendly and fair-minded among each other, oppressors need to embrace a shared cover story that recasts their oppressive behaviour as a form of benevolence. It is this motive—reputation management among the oppressor class rather than manipulation of the oppressed—that drives system-justifying ideologies.

Marx and many later radical left-wing intellectuals were ignorant of this process through which reputation management distorts belief systems. For this reason, it didn’t occur to them that their own analyses—their own ideology or “consciousness”—might also have been corrupted by their eagerness to make themselves look good.

They assumed that because they sought to expose and challenge society’s power structures, their work couldn’t be distorted by grubby motives. But this was naive. By painting existing societies as oppressive nightmares, they implicitly depicted themselves as the heroic liberators of humanity, morally superior to society’s villains and intellectually superior to its victims. It was they, the radical intellectuals, who possessed the unique ingenuity and courage to see the moral catastrophe of modern society and its historical arc of progress towards a future utopia.

It is one of history’s great ironies that these radical ideologies provided a powerful new cover story, a novel form of system justification, for some of the most despotic and exploitative regimes in the twentieth century. In countries such as Russia, China, Korea, and Cambodia, they gifted a new class of extractive elites a way of framing their despotism as liberation, a necessary path on the way to achieving utopian societies hallucinated in the minds of intellectuals. In this way, the very theorists who sought to unmask society’s dominant ideologies manufactured a deceptive mask for some of history’s worst forms of domination.

There is a cautionary lesson here applicable to our modern era. But first, it is helpful to start the analysis much further back: with the unique features of Homo sapiens that make us the only dominance-seeking species to be in denial about our dominance seeking.