"Marx’s claim that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."
I think the way you discuss this has the merit of clarity but I suspect it lacks some necessary context. it overlooks the fact that Marx was involved in a polemical dispute with the philosophers of his time. His was not an attack on everyday commonsensical views about the world and of course he knew that thinking about the world influenced existence, this was obvious. His attack was on Hegel's view of the leading role of spirit in human affairs. If you see world history as the unfolding of the works of an idea, as did Hegel (and others of the period) then Marx set about turning this on its head (as did Feuerbach). Having turned it on his head, seeing the world as evolving not as the unfolding of spirit but as the development of the real material world in social circumstances with social modes that were not forces of nature but networks of social conventions that have developed historically then his notion of historical materialism is perhaps at this level more appealing and his emphasis on the importance of social relations is surely justified. We live in such a social network and that network does indeed profoundly structure our consciousness. Historical materialism from this perspective is just the recognition that the real world (not the spirit world) is the world we live in and this world evolves historically and that an important dimension of this is social relationships and in this he emphasized key economic relationships, believing that these relationships had a profound impact on the structure of the society of which they were a part. The truth of this is pretty obvious and has been brilliantly discuss for example by Polanyi in The Great Transformation which charts the evolution of key economic relationships that it is so easy today to take for granted as facts of life as if they as immutable as the laws of nature. :)
It is tricky talking about Marx today because he wrote before modern social sciences existed and his work ranged across philosophy, economics, sociology, political theory, historical studies... He got a lot wrong that's for sure.And the tools he used are hopelessly out of date. But seen in proper context his was a pretty remarkable body of work and he did get some big things right. The world is not the evolution of some spirit, the world and our interpretation of it are shaped by the social relations that we have developed, those relationships do evolve and are not facts of nature, economic relations are profoundly important to the structure of any society. Many of these things are taken for granted today. But that was not always the case.
I agree with several of your observations but am not convinced by your argument. I want raise two points:
1. Your interpretation of Marx’s theory of ideology puts most emphasis on the aspect of the ruling class and its manipulation of the workers’ consciousness. This is very much the perspective of the later Marxists, from Lukacs to Gramsci to Adorno, essentially to explain why the workers did not overthrow capitalism.
I want to offer a different interpretation. The starting point for Marx was the critique of religion, as developed by Feuerbach, from whom he took the idea that humans can be governed by their own creations, as summarized in this quote:
‘As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his brain, so in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand’ (Marx, Capital vol 1).
Humans created religions and God, but believers think God created humans. Accordingly, for Marx, in capitalism false consciousness is the product of an ‘inverted reality’. This inverted reality is reflected in thought and leads to mystifications. Faulty reasoning is not the problem as people develop necessarily false beliefs in such a society. Education and better information will not be enough to change this, as someone who can explain mirages does not thereby cease to see them.
The mystification in capitalism is the view that capital has occult powers which make it grow, whereas the source of surplus is hidden (I know you think the labour theory of value is untenable, but this does not affect the basic line of Marx’s argument).
Marx’s theory of ideology is closely related to the notions of reification and alienation: Things are concealing social relations and appear to have power over us. This line of thought opens the possibility to imagine another world in which humans become masters of their own fate.
There are problems with this argument, too. But for now, I just want to make the point that your dismissal of Marx depends on a very peculiar construction of his argument. It is informed by a retrospective interpretation, mainly informed by the Frankfurt School.
2. Your take on this famous Marx quote
-- ‘it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ --
You comment:
‘Even setting aside most of the other claims associated with historical materialism, this “materialist” idea looks to be obviously wrong. Historically, one of the great pathologies of philosophers is a tendency towards absurd exaggeration. That’s on full display here. The claim that ideas do not float free of material factors is an important insight, albeit not one original to Marx. The idea that they are wholly downstream of more basic material factors is simply mistaken.’
As you correctly explain, by materialist Marx does not mean a metaphysical doctrine, ‘but a sociological one about the priority of “material” factors over ideas in explaining historical change.’
Sociologists would later use the term social relations to describe this process, for example Durkheim with his different mechanisms of creating social order, through integration and regulation. Mary Douglas has taken this further in her grid-group analysis. This body of work assumes, as you do, that the fee floating of ideas does not help us understand belief formation on a societal scale, which is to say that we can find some kind of pattern which show a correspondence between social structure and ideologies. Of course there will always be exceptions, but these cannot count as a refutation of a theory.
What I find interesting (and ironic) is that you also follow this Marx-Durkheim-Social Science methodological device when proposing the term ‘socially motivated ignorance’ (in your Synthese article). As you say, we don’t get very far with the notion of ‘the free floating of ideas.’ But you attack Marx for absurdly exaggerating by explaining them via ‘downstream of more basic material factors.’ How is your analysis of socially motivated ignorance different to this?
You are so right about academia being the last refuge for Marxism - or rather the idea that capitalism is uniquely able to make people stupid. I am endlessly intrigued by how 'critical thinking' is equated with being anti-capitalist.
False beliefs promulgated by those who are dominant can be very durable. The best example is the belief that women were irrational, incapable of original thought, hence ineligible for higher education or political leadership. Feminists drew on Marxism but Marx, himself, did not view gender as central to his theory.
One reason some liberals claim that voters in the last election were victims of false consciousness, hence voted against their own interests is that they mistakenly believe that the only interests people have are economic.
Unless I am mistaken Marx was by no means the major theorist of ideology in the history of Marxist thought. And this is understandable because he (mistakenly) believed that as capitalism continued to immiserate the proletariat their ghastly circumstances would automatically become apparent to them and they would rebel. This proved to be completely mistaken. It was therefore important to explain why. And it was in explaining this that the theory of ideology proper came into being (Lukacs being an early theorist, Gramsci another...usw)
"In the end, I think the most valuable aspect of Marx's approach to political epistemology is this broader insight that understanding politics requires examining how power shapes the production and distribution of knowledge and ignorance in society"
Nice layout of Marx's pertinent views as well as other views such as Folk Economics that are contrary to a politicized power conspiracy making people irrational, and instead explaining widespread views as generated through normal social operations, perhaps in error but understandable and plausible to be held, and dealing with a complex difficult reality not lending itself to simple quick understanding, as Shakespeare summarizes 'things are not as they seem'.
While epistemology and pieces like strata interests, flattering paradigms, and contest and replacement of ideas are valid things to be learned, false consciousness in all its flavors seems like a dumbing down, instrumentalist views constructed for their perceived political rather than explanatory utility. It appeals as a short cut to confidence in fulfilling biologic drives for empathy and the struggle of the hero against unfair and for fair. Specifically with Marx it seems to be not studying or in any way grasping Marx's views, but wielding his moral authority with simple catechism. Lazy and or lack of rounded experience.
Its a problem shorting cutting potentially productive intellectuals, but it may or may not be Marx's fault, and there are likely much bigger factors such as the growth of the governance stratum since the 1970s and the unfortunate wack woke or civic religion tangent within it. At the same time dumbed Marx was a part of this turn, when false consciousness could no longer plausibly explain workers keeping their chains, and a new victim had to be found for the arts admin stratum - the intersectional and Mother Nature.
When momentous changes are brewing in society great thinkers study harder to make sense of new things appearing, generating deeper theories and others pay more attention. These improved, accumulated ideas stay around longer and as generations pass there is always mystery around what is contingent to the time and place of generation vs broader abstractions with longer explanatory power. Marx observed through history that lower but somewhat capable classes or groups revolted against higher ones. Nearly always this adjusts the terms and details of social operation advancing it a bit, but does not overthrow and introduce an epoch of social organization. However mid 1800 to mid 1900 was a rare case where it did. Marx was in the throes of this revolution and correctly predicted that state organization would significantly increase its role in social operation. In fact this did occur in all advanced and large countries.
Yet Marx extrapolated this contingent situation to an operation through multiple historic periods and even eschatologic ending of poverty and conflict. There is a grain of truth to this prediction in the spread of prosperity and knowledge by technology that compared to 1850 seems like a utopian lifestyle where the poorest in 80% of countries today live better than kings at that time, and diminished conflict though no where near ended. We can blame him for this exaggerated scope. It may be that Marx's popularity and usage relates a lot to the ease of his theories to be instrumentalized for political change. And all broad long paradigms organize and perpetuate through incorporation to a state formation.
Yet there also exists a valuable cannon of political economy in the south-central-west intellectual tradition, from Kautilya, ibn Khaldun, Smith, Marx, Schumpeter, and Akamatsu. Doubtless a parallel cannon exists in the Chinese intellectual tradition soon to be shared and compared with the West. A bit submerged below the economics paradigm but as the challenge of developing state capacity to manage intelligent software economy becomes more urgent and wider, this cannon will likely be helpful.
And so the discounting of Marx theory to explain the perniciousness of the hazard of false consciousness may be broader than needed. The labor theory of value isnt discredited, there's a smorgasbord of inchoate and mutually exclusive objections. The base and superstructure metaphor remains explanatory of the faster technology vs slower state and culture, and need not be logically incompatible with concepts of iteration between elements. Tools and production have more gravity in social change. Could anyone in a given period think and organize really hard and leap to the next period? Clearly not, the base moves first, faster. 'Determine' however, is likely an unfortunate term to call this.
:Given this, the most plausible reason why ordinary people do not typically see the features of capitalism posited by Marx is not because they are victims of false consciousness but because Marx hallucinated such features. In fact, some research suggests that Marx’s analysis of false consciousness in the context of capitalism got things precisely backwards: without theoretical enlightenment, most people bring simplistic, zero-sum, hunter-gatherer moral intuitions to their understanding of economic matters, which obscure or “mask” the power and efficiency of competitive markets in allocating resources, incentivising innovation, and driving growth.:
I don't wish to be unduly pedantic, but fairness to Marx he didn't develop the theory of false consciousness, nor did Engels. That task was undertaken by Lukacs.
The term 'hallucinated' is provocative so lets explore what you are saying that Marx hallucinated :)
The underlying idea that Lukacs developed into a full blown, and doubtless mistaken, theory built upon Marx's view that people were indeed blind to 'features of capitalism.' More specifically, the economic structure that he analyzed through the lens of the 'means of production.' This analysis was not, he believed, intuitively obvious. It was precisely this hidden nature, the disguising of socio-economic relations (such as property rights) as laws of nature that blinded people to what was really 'going on' in capitalism.
I'm confused why Marx's thinking on this 'got things precisely backwards.' I'm even more confused when you go on to say 'without theoretical enlightenment, most people bring simplistic, zero-sum, hunter-gatherer moral intuitions to their understanding of economic matters, which obscure or “mask” the power and efficiency of competitive markets in allocating resources, incentivising innovation, and driving growth' because that is exactly what Marx thought. That is surely a statement of how everyday interpretations of our socio-economic reality are not intuitively obvious and indeed our confusions do stem from our lack of appropriate tools to better penetrate how economies and their impact on the social realm 'really' do operate.
Marx got a good deal wrong. But was he wrong about the inability of people to penetrate into the complexity of modern life, notably the importance of economic structure? I don't think so. When you say that our hunter gatherer intuitions 'obscure or “mask” the power and efficiency of competitive markets in allocating resources, incentivising innovation, and driving growth.' what is that but a restatement of Marx's core point. He thought that the underlying structure immiserated people, you are praising the virtues of markets, but you are making the same structural point. Most people (maybe all) just aren't equipped to 'see through' the complexity of socio economic structures and most people take the structure they live in to be an enduring reality like a fact of nature. The key criticism of Marx is surely that his economic theory was broken and so broken that his predicted theory of social class was flawed which in turn meant that the predicted evolution of class consciousness was broken... etc. A good deal was broken. But surely the idea that people were poorly equipped to understand capitalist societies wasn't. The follow on points about the precise nature of the resultant poor understanding were broken.
It's fun to compare the idea of false consciousness with the seemingly contradictory idea of standpoint theory. Both essentially spring from and are reactions to the same problem of "lossy" individual perception of the world, but make different claims to validity depending on whom the perceiver is, and what conclusions they arrive at.
Cishet white rural guy thinks capitalism is fine? False consciousness!
Black disabled lesbians throwing bricks at Starbucks? Standpoint epistemology!
I'm sure someone has pointed out that this is a transparently normative/positivist framework despite the apparent distaste for normativity in CT?
In any case, it's probably the reason why Bannon et al have suddenly taken an interest in postmodern theory. They find it both useful and vulnerable to capture, since it has an inherent contradiction of critiquing powerful cultural ideologies, but has also become one itself. Dialectical version of "I know you are but what am I!?"
If we take the dominant ideology to be Critical Theory’s current dogmas around race, sex, gender, economics, etc., it’s kind of fun to speculate on the questions of whose interests are served and why others accept them.
"In the end, I think the most valuable aspect of Marx's approach to political epistemology is this broader insight that understanding politics requires examining how power shapes the production and distribution of knowledge and ignorance in society"
And this leads naturally not just into epistemic insights but the raw exercise of political power - into Marx's theory of the state. This theory was so embryonic, so little developed, that it left a gapng hole to be filled by dangerous actors - notably Lenin.
Marx didn't have a political theory. Lenin was happy to solve the problem. Unfortunately his solution was profoundly anti democratic / flat out authoritarian.
This is wonderfully challenging and fascinating. I fear my own thoughts are fairly earthbound and much more associative than logical, but I do enjoy the way you are stimulating thinking. These are my associations on a first read of this post:
I never read Marx, but of course it seeps into one’s consciousness, and it did seem his theory failed, at least in broad strokes. I similarly have long thought that the strain of progressive thought that boils down political tensions to class and dismisses other factors that may be at play is too reductive. (I did actually think, and still do, that “intersectionality” as originally conceived at least, was a useful concept.)
I am reminded of Theda Skocpol’s book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” While there are many who considered the movement to be “astro-turf,” that is, led totally from the top down, she made a compelling case that there was indeed a genuine, bottom-up grassroots movement that was then exploited by top-down forces—so it was a combination of several elements, neither wholly top down nor wholly bottom up. (At least that’s the impression with which the book left me.)
The other thing I am reminded of is a person who describes himself as a “Marxist socialist” who I thought had one of the most interesting short form analyses I have read about the way belief in gender identity precepts has taken hold so thoroughly in so many quarters. As I read it again now (I set it forth below), it does seem in one sense that he is positing a late-capitalism-induced false consciousness as the cause of this. Yet I have to say, I find it explains more than many theories do about why it may have caught on so dramatically—a severe, crippling manufactured desire.
No doubt my own thoughts are far off the mark from what we are meant to have gleaned here! Not that anyone will read on this far, but in the event, here is what he wrote:
“One of the most infuriating things about gender insanity is that its proponents have presented themselves as being on “the left,” and its opponents have gone along with it. As gender-critical voices call out the lunacy, they often make the mistake of pinning it all on “the left.”
“It’s not left. Despite the venomous accusations hurled by the well-meaning-but-politically-un-read, pushing “gender-affirming-care” for minors isn’t socialist, or Marxist, or anarcho-pinko of whatever shade - it’s the very embodiment of late capitalism. While there are the usual sanctimonious true believers - useful idiots, enthusiastically flogging this snake-oil - the gender snake-oil itself has been brought to you by Pfizer and Merck and Eli-Lilly.
“Transition is an industry - a profitable one. Gender identity is a reified cultural product that’s been sold to an entire generation of vulnerable kids. And for the kids who’ve bought the concept, there are the Wall-Street-traded big pharma dope-dealers to deliver the hard goods - puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, expensive surgical procedures.
“It wasn’t difficult for big pharma spin doctors to sell the idea. It worked the way marketing always works. Convince the sucker, first, that he’s incomplete - and then that you have just the thing to complete him. It’s the same as selling that new Toyota or iPhone. Just tap into the sucker’s insecurities and existing discontent and offer the product as the cure for them. That Camry isn’t just a car. It’s part of you. That new iPhone isn’t just a thing for your use. It defines you. It’s who you are. These things make you ok. They make you valid. Because, well, you weren’t valid or ok before. Now you’re ok.
“Turns out that some people need a double mastectomy at twenty to be ok. Some teenage boys need estrogen to be valid. Your nine-year-old may need puberty-blockers. Because he’s not ok.
“Hard to believe that the campus pink-haired freak mob could organize such a well-funded-and-orchestrated growth of a billion dollar medical industry. Anyone trying to trace the origins of gender madness might be better advised to do some sniffing around corporate board-rooms.
“The gender movement is the mother of all astro-turf movements. Fake grass roots. Seems so bleeding-edgy. It gives the illusion of being oh-so-progressive, while changing absolutely jack shit for the poor, for the working class, for the real balance of power and the distribution of wealth in our society.
“PT Barnum laughs in hell as Marx rolls in his grave.
“The gender movement is not a creature of the left.”
This is wonderfully challenging and fascinating. I fear my own thoughts are fairly earthbound and much more associative than logical, but I do enjoy the way you are stimulating thinking. These are my associations on a first read of this post:
I never read Marx, but of course it seeps into one’s consciousness, and it did seem his theory failed, at least in broad strokes. I similarly have long thought that the strain of progressive thought that boils down political tensions to class and dismisses other factors that may be at play is too reductive. (I did actually think, and still do, that “intersectionality” as originally conceived at least, was a useful concept.)
I am reminded of Theda Skocpol’s book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” While there are many who considered the movement to be “astro-turf,” that is, led totally from the top down, she made a compelling case that there was indeed a genuine, bottom-up grassroots movement that was then exploited by top-down forces—so it was a combination of several elements, neither wholly top down nor wholly bottom up. (At least that’s the impression with which the book left me.)
The other thing I am reminded of is a person who describes himself as a “Marxist socialist” who I thought had one of the most interesting short form analyses I have read about the way belief in gender identity precepts has taken hold so thoroughly in so many quarters. As I read it again now (I set it forth below), it does seem in one sense that he is positing a late-capitalism-induced false consciousness as the cause of this. Yet I have to say, I find it explains more than many theories do about why it may have caught on so dramatically—a severe, crippling manufactured desire.
No doubt my own thoughts are far off the mark from what we are meant to have gleaned here! Not that anyone will read on this far, but in the event, here is what he wrote:
“One of the most infuriating things about gender insanity is that its proponents have presented themselves as being on “the left,” and its opponents have gone along with it. As gender-critical voices call out the lunacy, they often make the mistake of pinning it all on “the left.”
“It’s not left. Despite the venomous accusations hurled by the well-meaning-but-politically-un-read, pushing “gender-affirming-care” for minors isn’t socialist, or Marxist, or anarcho-pinko of whatever shade - it’s the very embodiment of late capitalism. While there are the usual sanctimonious true believers - useful idiots, enthusiastically flogging this snake-oil - the gender snake-oil itself has been brought to you by Pfizer and Merck and Eli-Lilly.
“Transition is an industry - a profitable one. Gender identity is a reified cultural product that’s been sold to an entire generation of vulnerable kids. And for the kids who’ve bought the concept, there are the Wall-Street-traded big pharma dope-dealers to deliver the hard goods - puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, expensive surgical procedures.
“It wasn’t difficult for big pharma spin doctors to sell the idea. It worked the way marketing always works. Convince the sucker, first, that he’s incomplete - and then that you have just the thing to complete him. It’s the same as selling that new Toyota or iPhone. Just tap into the sucker’s insecurities and existing discontent and offer the product as the cure for them. That Camry isn’t just a car. It’s part of you. That new iPhone isn’t just a thing for your use. It defines you. It’s who you are. These things make you ok. They make you valid. Because, well, you weren’t valid or ok before. Now you’re ok.
“Turns out that some people need a double mastectomy at twenty to be ok. Some teenage boys need estrogen to be valid. Your nine-year-old may need puberty-blockers. Because he’s not ok.
“Hard to believe that the campus pink-haired freak mob could organize such a well-funded-and-orchestrated growth of a billion dollar medical industry. Anyone trying to trace the origins of gender madness might be better advised to do some sniffing around corporate board-rooms.
“The gender movement is the mother of all astro-turf movements. Fake grass roots. Seems so bleeding-edgy. It gives the illusion of being oh-so-progressive, while changing absolutely jack shit for the poor, for the working class, for the real balance of power and the distribution of wealth in our society.
“PT Barnum laughs in hell as Marx rolls in his grave.
“The gender movement is not a creature of the left.”
This is immediately relevant to my response post I am hoping to publish in the next couple of days.
I was caught off guard by your treatment of "ideology" with neutral connotations, in part because I am inferring from other pieces that "idealism" comes with negative connotations.
Specifically, and this may be an improper inference, I am imagining that to support the conclusion that "it is okay to be cynical," you would be highlighting cynicism's functional inoculation and dissuation from idealism. Please correct me if this is in error.
The upcoming post is meant to highlight the ambiguity of whether "woke ideology" is rightly attributed to "idealism" moreso than an outlandish cynicism toward white, male etcetera+ "power structures." Given that performative wokeness was largely a white, male etcetera+ phenomenon, some part of the explanation may lie with distrusting the idealised political left to accept them with only "half-measures."
I am also making the case that "Darwinian Cynicism," as conceived, is a special case that aims to include somewhat laborious self-reflection even after intensive education on the subject. However, if the general case of cynicism is a prolific, reputational hyper-vigilance among and within a few makeshift alliances, then one might expect the exhaustion and performative noise it breeds to assimilate "it's okay to be cynical" to signal "it's okay to stop trying because no one really is."
If generally accurate, it seems this scenario would be hard to square with the sentiment or disposition I am inferring your intention to be. As you've noted here, collective action is already challenging, and the somewhat presumptive alternative, honest and effortful communal and self-reflection, does not seem a more likely product than a defeatist nihilism in this context.
Please correct me on any of these assumptions or points, lest I make a fool of myself spinning out on my own speculations!
"Given the vastness, complexity, invisibility, and ambiguity of political issues in the modern world, a wide range of opinions is inevitable, and systematic “falsity”—whether about our interests or anything else—is better understood as the default state we all find ourselves in, not an aberration induced by exploitative economic systems."
This assertion - central to your main conclusion - is wholly unsupported, and in my view unsupportable. Notwithstanding that it contains some truisms to it that are beside the point.
In fact, an entire propaganda industry is dedicated to the opposite conclusion: that people unless bamboozled by the profiteers and their closely aligned cultural institutions are likely to act generally based on their decent impulses to their own best interests, broadly and more or less collectively - the truism of competing factions aside. So you have to propagandize the decency and sensibility out of the people, and boy do they via the PR industry and aligned cultural institutions.
And Lippmann stands right there ready and willing and encouraging the elevated minority of propagandists to propagandize the masses. It's sick. Of course, Lippmann thinks "technocratic" propaganda will be used by the good guys (elites) for good ends, but any knowledge of the capitalist plutocracy and the many forms of oligarchy shows the opposite to be true.
There are fine points to be made in all this, but you get far more of those from Dewey than from the assumption-fraught cheese offered up by Lippmann.
I had a long reply, but it boils down to this: working in the banking industry for both banks and regulators, the deep uncertainty view aligns with my experience much more than "masterminds". Banks are fairly sophisticated operators, but the world is too complicated and we use heuristics and ideological judgement because we must. As a capitalist "insider", my experience is that deep uncertainty and storytelling is in the water, not created to deceive. Obviously if you believe I'm deceptive, this view will play into your narrative.
1) A lot of business/financial PR is very explicit and conscious of being intentionally deceptive.
2) A lot of other business/financial PR simply ignores or dismisses collateral damage, and so to the extent that this view is internalized by its practitioners, there's no conscious deception involved despite any false narratives and destructive consequences.
3) Certain laws require certain corporate structures to maximize profits for their shareholders, social damages be damned. And these corporate structures lobby for these laws, help implement them, and help enforce them. And often lie about them to make it all happen. Plutocrats often internalize this as a good thing. Some are simply Cons and don't care.
4) And a lot of business and financial activity is "simply" actors and organizations acting rationally within market and regulatory structures (though these entities are constantly trying to game the external structures to their benefit too). It sounds like this is what you are speaking of.
So it's complex, anything is, but the private owners in general, the plutocracy, constantly try to impose their will on the public whether the people like it or not, whether the world burns to a crisp or blows up or not. Elon Musk and Con Don Trump pronounce one demonstrable lie after another. For that matter, so did Genocide Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Establishment Dems and Reps it has been pointed out are two wings of the same predatory bird. There are some good effects to be found amid all the exploitation and destruction, but it's the exploitation and destruction that are at issue. There are far more humane ways to achieve far more good effects than by way of the PR of the profiteers.
Lippmann isn't advocating for a technocracy of people's councils. He's advocating for a technocracy of the elites. In state-capitalist societies, that means the technocracy of plutocracy and plutocratic ideology. In other words, top down tyranny - very anti-democracy. The many different degrees of deception and fraud that is often mixed into the PR is the icing on the cake of an inherently anti-democracy approach.
Dewey essentially explains that people's councils are the way to go and work best - we might understand this as platforms - green new deal and other progressive and human rights planks. Lippmann tries to reason that this can't work. He can't prove it. It can't be proved. But he tries to reason it. And his alternative has been embraced by the state-capitalist owners of money and resources (and oligarchs everywhere) and led us to the omnicidal condition of life today, leaving the Deweyites to basically try to save the world - from the homicidal and suicidal reign of the technocrats of plutocracy.
Marina Nitze's insight might be relevant here: that bureaucracies are rarely designed, but they are often defended as if they were. Those that benefit from such arrangements, by those very heuristics and ideological judgements you mention, come to ritualize and rationalize somewhat arbitrary elements that are nevertheless non-trivial in effect, but again, not by design.
Those now seen as contrarian to this group, with their own ritualized and rationalized posturing, can't be assumed to have started with this disposition. There is a kind of earned equilibrium where the insensitivity of those who benefit is met with the inspecificity of those who are wholly dismissed, regardless of their level of effort or care.
"Marx’s claim that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."
I think the way you discuss this has the merit of clarity but I suspect it lacks some necessary context. it overlooks the fact that Marx was involved in a polemical dispute with the philosophers of his time. His was not an attack on everyday commonsensical views about the world and of course he knew that thinking about the world influenced existence, this was obvious. His attack was on Hegel's view of the leading role of spirit in human affairs. If you see world history as the unfolding of the works of an idea, as did Hegel (and others of the period) then Marx set about turning this on its head (as did Feuerbach). Having turned it on his head, seeing the world as evolving not as the unfolding of spirit but as the development of the real material world in social circumstances with social modes that were not forces of nature but networks of social conventions that have developed historically then his notion of historical materialism is perhaps at this level more appealing and his emphasis on the importance of social relations is surely justified. We live in such a social network and that network does indeed profoundly structure our consciousness. Historical materialism from this perspective is just the recognition that the real world (not the spirit world) is the world we live in and this world evolves historically and that an important dimension of this is social relationships and in this he emphasized key economic relationships, believing that these relationships had a profound impact on the structure of the society of which they were a part. The truth of this is pretty obvious and has been brilliantly discuss for example by Polanyi in The Great Transformation which charts the evolution of key economic relationships that it is so easy today to take for granted as facts of life as if they as immutable as the laws of nature. :)
It is tricky talking about Marx today because he wrote before modern social sciences existed and his work ranged across philosophy, economics, sociology, political theory, historical studies... He got a lot wrong that's for sure.And the tools he used are hopelessly out of date. But seen in proper context his was a pretty remarkable body of work and he did get some big things right. The world is not the evolution of some spirit, the world and our interpretation of it are shaped by the social relations that we have developed, those relationships do evolve and are not facts of nature, economic relations are profoundly important to the structure of any society. Many of these things are taken for granted today. But that was not always the case.
I agree with several of your observations but am not convinced by your argument. I want raise two points:
1. Your interpretation of Marx’s theory of ideology puts most emphasis on the aspect of the ruling class and its manipulation of the workers’ consciousness. This is very much the perspective of the later Marxists, from Lukacs to Gramsci to Adorno, essentially to explain why the workers did not overthrow capitalism.
I want to offer a different interpretation. The starting point for Marx was the critique of religion, as developed by Feuerbach, from whom he took the idea that humans can be governed by their own creations, as summarized in this quote:
‘As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his brain, so in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand’ (Marx, Capital vol 1).
Humans created religions and God, but believers think God created humans. Accordingly, for Marx, in capitalism false consciousness is the product of an ‘inverted reality’. This inverted reality is reflected in thought and leads to mystifications. Faulty reasoning is not the problem as people develop necessarily false beliefs in such a society. Education and better information will not be enough to change this, as someone who can explain mirages does not thereby cease to see them.
The mystification in capitalism is the view that capital has occult powers which make it grow, whereas the source of surplus is hidden (I know you think the labour theory of value is untenable, but this does not affect the basic line of Marx’s argument).
Marx’s theory of ideology is closely related to the notions of reification and alienation: Things are concealing social relations and appear to have power over us. This line of thought opens the possibility to imagine another world in which humans become masters of their own fate.
There are problems with this argument, too. But for now, I just want to make the point that your dismissal of Marx depends on a very peculiar construction of his argument. It is informed by a retrospective interpretation, mainly informed by the Frankfurt School.
2. Your take on this famous Marx quote
-- ‘it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ --
You comment:
‘Even setting aside most of the other claims associated with historical materialism, this “materialist” idea looks to be obviously wrong. Historically, one of the great pathologies of philosophers is a tendency towards absurd exaggeration. That’s on full display here. The claim that ideas do not float free of material factors is an important insight, albeit not one original to Marx. The idea that they are wholly downstream of more basic material factors is simply mistaken.’
As you correctly explain, by materialist Marx does not mean a metaphysical doctrine, ‘but a sociological one about the priority of “material” factors over ideas in explaining historical change.’
Sociologists would later use the term social relations to describe this process, for example Durkheim with his different mechanisms of creating social order, through integration and regulation. Mary Douglas has taken this further in her grid-group analysis. This body of work assumes, as you do, that the fee floating of ideas does not help us understand belief formation on a societal scale, which is to say that we can find some kind of pattern which show a correspondence between social structure and ideologies. Of course there will always be exceptions, but these cannot count as a refutation of a theory.
What I find interesting (and ironic) is that you also follow this Marx-Durkheim-Social Science methodological device when proposing the term ‘socially motivated ignorance’ (in your Synthese article). As you say, we don’t get very far with the notion of ‘the free floating of ideas.’ But you attack Marx for absurdly exaggerating by explaining them via ‘downstream of more basic material factors.’ How is your analysis of socially motivated ignorance different to this?
You are so right about academia being the last refuge for Marxism - or rather the idea that capitalism is uniquely able to make people stupid. I am endlessly intrigued by how 'critical thinking' is equated with being anti-capitalist.
False beliefs promulgated by those who are dominant can be very durable. The best example is the belief that women were irrational, incapable of original thought, hence ineligible for higher education or political leadership. Feminists drew on Marxism but Marx, himself, did not view gender as central to his theory.
One reason some liberals claim that voters in the last election were victims of false consciousness, hence voted against their own interests is that they mistakenly believe that the only interests people have are economic.
Unless I am mistaken Marx was by no means the major theorist of ideology in the history of Marxist thought. And this is understandable because he (mistakenly) believed that as capitalism continued to immiserate the proletariat their ghastly circumstances would automatically become apparent to them and they would rebel. This proved to be completely mistaken. It was therefore important to explain why. And it was in explaining this that the theory of ideology proper came into being (Lukacs being an early theorist, Gramsci another...usw)
"In the end, I think the most valuable aspect of Marx's approach to political epistemology is this broader insight that understanding politics requires examining how power shapes the production and distribution of knowledge and ignorance in society"
Agreed.
Nice layout of Marx's pertinent views as well as other views such as Folk Economics that are contrary to a politicized power conspiracy making people irrational, and instead explaining widespread views as generated through normal social operations, perhaps in error but understandable and plausible to be held, and dealing with a complex difficult reality not lending itself to simple quick understanding, as Shakespeare summarizes 'things are not as they seem'.
While epistemology and pieces like strata interests, flattering paradigms, and contest and replacement of ideas are valid things to be learned, false consciousness in all its flavors seems like a dumbing down, instrumentalist views constructed for their perceived political rather than explanatory utility. It appeals as a short cut to confidence in fulfilling biologic drives for empathy and the struggle of the hero against unfair and for fair. Specifically with Marx it seems to be not studying or in any way grasping Marx's views, but wielding his moral authority with simple catechism. Lazy and or lack of rounded experience.
Its a problem shorting cutting potentially productive intellectuals, but it may or may not be Marx's fault, and there are likely much bigger factors such as the growth of the governance stratum since the 1970s and the unfortunate wack woke or civic religion tangent within it. At the same time dumbed Marx was a part of this turn, when false consciousness could no longer plausibly explain workers keeping their chains, and a new victim had to be found for the arts admin stratum - the intersectional and Mother Nature.
When momentous changes are brewing in society great thinkers study harder to make sense of new things appearing, generating deeper theories and others pay more attention. These improved, accumulated ideas stay around longer and as generations pass there is always mystery around what is contingent to the time and place of generation vs broader abstractions with longer explanatory power. Marx observed through history that lower but somewhat capable classes or groups revolted against higher ones. Nearly always this adjusts the terms and details of social operation advancing it a bit, but does not overthrow and introduce an epoch of social organization. However mid 1800 to mid 1900 was a rare case where it did. Marx was in the throes of this revolution and correctly predicted that state organization would significantly increase its role in social operation. In fact this did occur in all advanced and large countries.
Yet Marx extrapolated this contingent situation to an operation through multiple historic periods and even eschatologic ending of poverty and conflict. There is a grain of truth to this prediction in the spread of prosperity and knowledge by technology that compared to 1850 seems like a utopian lifestyle where the poorest in 80% of countries today live better than kings at that time, and diminished conflict though no where near ended. We can blame him for this exaggerated scope. It may be that Marx's popularity and usage relates a lot to the ease of his theories to be instrumentalized for political change. And all broad long paradigms organize and perpetuate through incorporation to a state formation.
Yet there also exists a valuable cannon of political economy in the south-central-west intellectual tradition, from Kautilya, ibn Khaldun, Smith, Marx, Schumpeter, and Akamatsu. Doubtless a parallel cannon exists in the Chinese intellectual tradition soon to be shared and compared with the West. A bit submerged below the economics paradigm but as the challenge of developing state capacity to manage intelligent software economy becomes more urgent and wider, this cannon will likely be helpful.
And so the discounting of Marx theory to explain the perniciousness of the hazard of false consciousness may be broader than needed. The labor theory of value isnt discredited, there's a smorgasbord of inchoate and mutually exclusive objections. The base and superstructure metaphor remains explanatory of the faster technology vs slower state and culture, and need not be logically incompatible with concepts of iteration between elements. Tools and production have more gravity in social change. Could anyone in a given period think and organize really hard and leap to the next period? Clearly not, the base moves first, faster. 'Determine' however, is likely an unfortunate term to call this.
:Given this, the most plausible reason why ordinary people do not typically see the features of capitalism posited by Marx is not because they are victims of false consciousness but because Marx hallucinated such features. In fact, some research suggests that Marx’s analysis of false consciousness in the context of capitalism got things precisely backwards: without theoretical enlightenment, most people bring simplistic, zero-sum, hunter-gatherer moral intuitions to their understanding of economic matters, which obscure or “mask” the power and efficiency of competitive markets in allocating resources, incentivising innovation, and driving growth.:
I don't wish to be unduly pedantic, but fairness to Marx he didn't develop the theory of false consciousness, nor did Engels. That task was undertaken by Lukacs.
The term 'hallucinated' is provocative so lets explore what you are saying that Marx hallucinated :)
The underlying idea that Lukacs developed into a full blown, and doubtless mistaken, theory built upon Marx's view that people were indeed blind to 'features of capitalism.' More specifically, the economic structure that he analyzed through the lens of the 'means of production.' This analysis was not, he believed, intuitively obvious. It was precisely this hidden nature, the disguising of socio-economic relations (such as property rights) as laws of nature that blinded people to what was really 'going on' in capitalism.
I'm confused why Marx's thinking on this 'got things precisely backwards.' I'm even more confused when you go on to say 'without theoretical enlightenment, most people bring simplistic, zero-sum, hunter-gatherer moral intuitions to their understanding of economic matters, which obscure or “mask” the power and efficiency of competitive markets in allocating resources, incentivising innovation, and driving growth' because that is exactly what Marx thought. That is surely a statement of how everyday interpretations of our socio-economic reality are not intuitively obvious and indeed our confusions do stem from our lack of appropriate tools to better penetrate how economies and their impact on the social realm 'really' do operate.
Marx got a good deal wrong. But was he wrong about the inability of people to penetrate into the complexity of modern life, notably the importance of economic structure? I don't think so. When you say that our hunter gatherer intuitions 'obscure or “mask” the power and efficiency of competitive markets in allocating resources, incentivising innovation, and driving growth.' what is that but a restatement of Marx's core point. He thought that the underlying structure immiserated people, you are praising the virtues of markets, but you are making the same structural point. Most people (maybe all) just aren't equipped to 'see through' the complexity of socio economic structures and most people take the structure they live in to be an enduring reality like a fact of nature. The key criticism of Marx is surely that his economic theory was broken and so broken that his predicted theory of social class was flawed which in turn meant that the predicted evolution of class consciousness was broken... etc. A good deal was broken. But surely the idea that people were poorly equipped to understand capitalist societies wasn't. The follow on points about the precise nature of the resultant poor understanding were broken.
It's fun to compare the idea of false consciousness with the seemingly contradictory idea of standpoint theory. Both essentially spring from and are reactions to the same problem of "lossy" individual perception of the world, but make different claims to validity depending on whom the perceiver is, and what conclusions they arrive at.
Cishet white rural guy thinks capitalism is fine? False consciousness!
Black disabled lesbians throwing bricks at Starbucks? Standpoint epistemology!
I'm sure someone has pointed out that this is a transparently normative/positivist framework despite the apparent distaste for normativity in CT?
In any case, it's probably the reason why Bannon et al have suddenly taken an interest in postmodern theory. They find it both useful and vulnerable to capture, since it has an inherent contradiction of critiquing powerful cultural ideologies, but has also become one itself. Dialectical version of "I know you are but what am I!?"
If we take the dominant ideology to be Critical Theory’s current dogmas around race, sex, gender, economics, etc., it’s kind of fun to speculate on the questions of whose interests are served and why others accept them.
"In the end, I think the most valuable aspect of Marx's approach to political epistemology is this broader insight that understanding politics requires examining how power shapes the production and distribution of knowledge and ignorance in society"
And this leads naturally not just into epistemic insights but the raw exercise of political power - into Marx's theory of the state. This theory was so embryonic, so little developed, that it left a gapng hole to be filled by dangerous actors - notably Lenin.
Marx didn't have a political theory. Lenin was happy to solve the problem. Unfortunately his solution was profoundly anti democratic / flat out authoritarian.
This is wonderfully challenging and fascinating. I fear my own thoughts are fairly earthbound and much more associative than logical, but I do enjoy the way you are stimulating thinking. These are my associations on a first read of this post:
I never read Marx, but of course it seeps into one’s consciousness, and it did seem his theory failed, at least in broad strokes. I similarly have long thought that the strain of progressive thought that boils down political tensions to class and dismisses other factors that may be at play is too reductive. (I did actually think, and still do, that “intersectionality” as originally conceived at least, was a useful concept.)
I am reminded of Theda Skocpol’s book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” While there are many who considered the movement to be “astro-turf,” that is, led totally from the top down, she made a compelling case that there was indeed a genuine, bottom-up grassroots movement that was then exploited by top-down forces—so it was a combination of several elements, neither wholly top down nor wholly bottom up. (At least that’s the impression with which the book left me.)
The other thing I am reminded of is a person who describes himself as a “Marxist socialist” who I thought had one of the most interesting short form analyses I have read about the way belief in gender identity precepts has taken hold so thoroughly in so many quarters. As I read it again now (I set it forth below), it does seem in one sense that he is positing a late-capitalism-induced false consciousness as the cause of this. Yet I have to say, I find it explains more than many theories do about why it may have caught on so dramatically—a severe, crippling manufactured desire.
No doubt my own thoughts are far off the mark from what we are meant to have gleaned here! Not that anyone will read on this far, but in the event, here is what he wrote:
“One of the most infuriating things about gender insanity is that its proponents have presented themselves as being on “the left,” and its opponents have gone along with it. As gender-critical voices call out the lunacy, they often make the mistake of pinning it all on “the left.”
“It’s not left. Despite the venomous accusations hurled by the well-meaning-but-politically-un-read, pushing “gender-affirming-care” for minors isn’t socialist, or Marxist, or anarcho-pinko of whatever shade - it’s the very embodiment of late capitalism. While there are the usual sanctimonious true believers - useful idiots, enthusiastically flogging this snake-oil - the gender snake-oil itself has been brought to you by Pfizer and Merck and Eli-Lilly.
“Transition is an industry - a profitable one. Gender identity is a reified cultural product that’s been sold to an entire generation of vulnerable kids. And for the kids who’ve bought the concept, there are the Wall-Street-traded big pharma dope-dealers to deliver the hard goods - puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, expensive surgical procedures.
“It wasn’t difficult for big pharma spin doctors to sell the idea. It worked the way marketing always works. Convince the sucker, first, that he’s incomplete - and then that you have just the thing to complete him. It’s the same as selling that new Toyota or iPhone. Just tap into the sucker’s insecurities and existing discontent and offer the product as the cure for them. That Camry isn’t just a car. It’s part of you. That new iPhone isn’t just a thing for your use. It defines you. It’s who you are. These things make you ok. They make you valid. Because, well, you weren’t valid or ok before. Now you’re ok.
“Turns out that some people need a double mastectomy at twenty to be ok. Some teenage boys need estrogen to be valid. Your nine-year-old may need puberty-blockers. Because he’s not ok.
“Hard to believe that the campus pink-haired freak mob could organize such a well-funded-and-orchestrated growth of a billion dollar medical industry. Anyone trying to trace the origins of gender madness might be better advised to do some sniffing around corporate board-rooms.
“The gender movement is the mother of all astro-turf movements. Fake grass roots. Seems so bleeding-edgy. It gives the illusion of being oh-so-progressive, while changing absolutely jack shit for the poor, for the working class, for the real balance of power and the distribution of wealth in our society.
“PT Barnum laughs in hell as Marx rolls in his grave.
“The gender movement is not a creature of the left.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/conspicuouscognition/p/false-consciousness-and-the-dominant?r=16541&utm_medium=ios
This is wonderfully challenging and fascinating. I fear my own thoughts are fairly earthbound and much more associative than logical, but I do enjoy the way you are stimulating thinking. These are my associations on a first read of this post:
I never read Marx, but of course it seeps into one’s consciousness, and it did seem his theory failed, at least in broad strokes. I similarly have long thought that the strain of progressive thought that boils down political tensions to class and dismisses other factors that may be at play is too reductive. (I did actually think, and still do, that “intersectionality” as originally conceived at least, was a useful concept.)
I am reminded of Theda Skocpol’s book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” While there are many who considered the movement to be “astro-turf,” that is, led totally from the top down, she made a compelling case that there was indeed a genuine, bottom-up grassroots movement that was then exploited by top-down forces—so it was a combination of several elements, neither wholly top down nor wholly bottom up. (At least that’s the impression with which the book left me.)
The other thing I am reminded of is a person who describes himself as a “Marxist socialist” who I thought had one of the most interesting short form analyses I have read about the way belief in gender identity precepts has taken hold so thoroughly in so many quarters. As I read it again now (I set it forth below), it does seem in one sense that he is positing a late-capitalism-induced false consciousness as the cause of this. Yet I have to say, I find it explains more than many theories do about why it may have caught on so dramatically—a severe, crippling manufactured desire.
No doubt my own thoughts are far off the mark from what we are meant to have gleaned here! Not that anyone will read on this far, but in the event, here is what he wrote:
“One of the most infuriating things about gender insanity is that its proponents have presented themselves as being on “the left,” and its opponents have gone along with it. As gender-critical voices call out the lunacy, they often make the mistake of pinning it all on “the left.”
“It’s not left. Despite the venomous accusations hurled by the well-meaning-but-politically-un-read, pushing “gender-affirming-care” for minors isn’t socialist, or Marxist, or anarcho-pinko of whatever shade - it’s the very embodiment of late capitalism. While there are the usual sanctimonious true believers - useful idiots, enthusiastically flogging this snake-oil - the gender snake-oil itself has been brought to you by Pfizer and Merck and Eli-Lilly.
“Transition is an industry - a profitable one. Gender identity is a reified cultural product that’s been sold to an entire generation of vulnerable kids. And for the kids who’ve bought the concept, there are the Wall-Street-traded big pharma dope-dealers to deliver the hard goods - puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, expensive surgical procedures.
“It wasn’t difficult for big pharma spin doctors to sell the idea. It worked the way marketing always works. Convince the sucker, first, that he’s incomplete - and then that you have just the thing to complete him. It’s the same as selling that new Toyota or iPhone. Just tap into the sucker’s insecurities and existing discontent and offer the product as the cure for them. That Camry isn’t just a car. It’s part of you. That new iPhone isn’t just a thing for your use. It defines you. It’s who you are. These things make you ok. They make you valid. Because, well, you weren’t valid or ok before. Now you’re ok.
“Turns out that some people need a double mastectomy at twenty to be ok. Some teenage boys need estrogen to be valid. Your nine-year-old may need puberty-blockers. Because he’s not ok.
“Hard to believe that the campus pink-haired freak mob could organize such a well-funded-and-orchestrated growth of a billion dollar medical industry. Anyone trying to trace the origins of gender madness might be better advised to do some sniffing around corporate board-rooms.
“The gender movement is the mother of all astro-turf movements. Fake grass roots. Seems so bleeding-edgy. It gives the illusion of being oh-so-progressive, while changing absolutely jack shit for the poor, for the working class, for the real balance of power and the distribution of wealth in our society.
“PT Barnum laughs in hell as Marx rolls in his grave.
“The gender movement is not a creature of the left.”
This is immediately relevant to my response post I am hoping to publish in the next couple of days.
I was caught off guard by your treatment of "ideology" with neutral connotations, in part because I am inferring from other pieces that "idealism" comes with negative connotations.
Specifically, and this may be an improper inference, I am imagining that to support the conclusion that "it is okay to be cynical," you would be highlighting cynicism's functional inoculation and dissuation from idealism. Please correct me if this is in error.
The upcoming post is meant to highlight the ambiguity of whether "woke ideology" is rightly attributed to "idealism" moreso than an outlandish cynicism toward white, male etcetera+ "power structures." Given that performative wokeness was largely a white, male etcetera+ phenomenon, some part of the explanation may lie with distrusting the idealised political left to accept them with only "half-measures."
I am also making the case that "Darwinian Cynicism," as conceived, is a special case that aims to include somewhat laborious self-reflection even after intensive education on the subject. However, if the general case of cynicism is a prolific, reputational hyper-vigilance among and within a few makeshift alliances, then one might expect the exhaustion and performative noise it breeds to assimilate "it's okay to be cynical" to signal "it's okay to stop trying because no one really is."
If generally accurate, it seems this scenario would be hard to square with the sentiment or disposition I am inferring your intention to be. As you've noted here, collective action is already challenging, and the somewhat presumptive alternative, honest and effortful communal and self-reflection, does not seem a more likely product than a defeatist nihilism in this context.
Please correct me on any of these assumptions or points, lest I make a fool of myself spinning out on my own speculations!
"Given the vastness, complexity, invisibility, and ambiguity of political issues in the modern world, a wide range of opinions is inevitable, and systematic “falsity”—whether about our interests or anything else—is better understood as the default state we all find ourselves in, not an aberration induced by exploitative economic systems."
This assertion - central to your main conclusion - is wholly unsupported, and in my view unsupportable. Notwithstanding that it contains some truisms to it that are beside the point.
In fact, an entire propaganda industry is dedicated to the opposite conclusion: that people unless bamboozled by the profiteers and their closely aligned cultural institutions are likely to act generally based on their decent impulses to their own best interests, broadly and more or less collectively - the truism of competing factions aside. So you have to propagandize the decency and sensibility out of the people, and boy do they via the PR industry and aligned cultural institutions.
And Lippmann stands right there ready and willing and encouraging the elevated minority of propagandists to propagandize the masses. It's sick. Of course, Lippmann thinks "technocratic" propaganda will be used by the good guys (elites) for good ends, but any knowledge of the capitalist plutocracy and the many forms of oligarchy shows the opposite to be true.
There are fine points to be made in all this, but you get far more of those from Dewey than from the assumption-fraught cheese offered up by Lippmann.
I had a long reply, but it boils down to this: working in the banking industry for both banks and regulators, the deep uncertainty view aligns with my experience much more than "masterminds". Banks are fairly sophisticated operators, but the world is too complicated and we use heuristics and ideological judgement because we must. As a capitalist "insider", my experience is that deep uncertainty and storytelling is in the water, not created to deceive. Obviously if you believe I'm deceptive, this view will play into your narrative.
There's multiple splits here:
1) A lot of business/financial PR is very explicit and conscious of being intentionally deceptive.
2) A lot of other business/financial PR simply ignores or dismisses collateral damage, and so to the extent that this view is internalized by its practitioners, there's no conscious deception involved despite any false narratives and destructive consequences.
3) Certain laws require certain corporate structures to maximize profits for their shareholders, social damages be damned. And these corporate structures lobby for these laws, help implement them, and help enforce them. And often lie about them to make it all happen. Plutocrats often internalize this as a good thing. Some are simply Cons and don't care.
4) And a lot of business and financial activity is "simply" actors and organizations acting rationally within market and regulatory structures (though these entities are constantly trying to game the external structures to their benefit too). It sounds like this is what you are speaking of.
So it's complex, anything is, but the private owners in general, the plutocracy, constantly try to impose their will on the public whether the people like it or not, whether the world burns to a crisp or blows up or not. Elon Musk and Con Don Trump pronounce one demonstrable lie after another. For that matter, so did Genocide Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Establishment Dems and Reps it has been pointed out are two wings of the same predatory bird. There are some good effects to be found amid all the exploitation and destruction, but it's the exploitation and destruction that are at issue. There are far more humane ways to achieve far more good effects than by way of the PR of the profiteers.
Lippmann isn't advocating for a technocracy of people's councils. He's advocating for a technocracy of the elites. In state-capitalist societies, that means the technocracy of plutocracy and plutocratic ideology. In other words, top down tyranny - very anti-democracy. The many different degrees of deception and fraud that is often mixed into the PR is the icing on the cake of an inherently anti-democracy approach.
Dewey essentially explains that people's councils are the way to go and work best - we might understand this as platforms - green new deal and other progressive and human rights planks. Lippmann tries to reason that this can't work. He can't prove it. It can't be proved. But he tries to reason it. And his alternative has been embraced by the state-capitalist owners of money and resources (and oligarchs everywhere) and led us to the omnicidal condition of life today, leaving the Deweyites to basically try to save the world - from the homicidal and suicidal reign of the technocrats of plutocracy.
Marina Nitze's insight might be relevant here: that bureaucracies are rarely designed, but they are often defended as if they were. Those that benefit from such arrangements, by those very heuristics and ideological judgements you mention, come to ritualize and rationalize somewhat arbitrary elements that are nevertheless non-trivial in effect, but again, not by design.
Those now seen as contrarian to this group, with their own ritualized and rationalized posturing, can't be assumed to have started with this disposition. There is a kind of earned equilibrium where the insensitivity of those who benefit is met with the inspecificity of those who are wholly dismissed, regardless of their level of effort or care.