Modern ideologies that claim to explain the world often do so through seemingly elegant, simplified and totalizing frameworks. The most visible ideologies reduce the moral and social complexity of the real world into a binary lens of guilt and innocence, dominance and submission, right and wrong, with little room for ambiguity or inconvenient facts.
Marxism categorizes all people into two economic classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. If you are not being exploited, you must be the exploiter. Any middle ground—such as the aspirational or entrepreneurial working class—must be dismissed or renamed to protect the model.
Post-colonialism sees global history through the lens of European (and only European) conquest, dividing peoples into colonizers and the colonized. If a group doesn't clearly fit into either role, the theory invents new terms (like "internal colonialism" or the modern use of "settler colonialism") to make them fit. Complexity is flattened into narrative clarity.
Critical Race Theory maps society onto racial hierarchies of power, privilege, and oppression. Those with power must be perpetuating structural racism, and those without must be victims of it. If groups of people contradict that model, the theory accuses them of internalized racism or reclassifies them as "white-adjacent."
Identity Politics breaks moral authority into group membership, granting credibility only to those deemed oppressed. Morality flows not from argument or behavior, but from status. Anyone challenging the ideological structure, even from within a marginalized group, is labeled a traitor to their identity.
Liberalism, in its classical form, frames the world as a tension between individual liberty and government overreach. Everyone is either for freedom or for tyranny. Liberalism supports freedom as a sufficient moral value, while remaining silent about immoral ideas that can flourish and subvert liberty itself within the system.
Environmentalism-as-apocalypticism divides the world into saviors of the planet and enemies of nature. Any technological optimism or nuanced cost-benefit thinking is framed as denial or betrayal. Solutions that don’t fit the doomsday narrative are dismissed as tools of the oil lobby or capitalist manipulation.
These frameworks don’t just describe the world—they offer moral clarity, identity, and belonging. They claim to turn chaos into order.
But what happens when reality pushes back? When facts don’t fit the model? The answer, in almost every case, is that the ideology adjusts the facts to preserve the theory. Contradictions are explained away. Data is reclassified. Motives are projected onto dissenters. The result is that these ideologies behave, under pressure, not like philosophy or science – but like conspiracy theories.
Ideology Becomes Conspiracy
A conspiracy theory is not defined merely by its content, but by its structure. What makes a theory conspiratorial is its refusal to admit disproof. Every counterexample becomes a secret confirmation. Every dissent is proof that the dissenter is compromised. Every failed prediction is reframed as deliberate misinformation planted by the enemy.
This is precisely how modern ideological frameworks operate:
| Trait | Conspiracy Theory | Modern Ideology (Marxism, Post-colonialism, CRT) |
|---|
| Immunity to Falsification | "That’s what they want you to believe." | "That’s internalized oppression / false consciousness." |
| Binary Thinking | The righteous vs the secret cabal. | Oppressor vs oppressed. |
| Dissent as Guilt | Disagreement proves you're in on it. | Disagreement proves you're privileged or complicit. |
| No Complexity | Every fact must fit the story. | Nuance is a distraction from justice. |
| Moral Absolutism | The theory is always righteous. | The theory cannot be questioned without moral failure. |
These modern ideologies offer not just an analysis of the world, but a moral identity to their followers. They are too brittle to accommodate counterexamples, but they are too ideologically constrained to admit that the real world contradicts their core tenets. Counterexamples collapse their theories, so they must be explained away and belittled. Correction is not an option. Reality must be reframed or denied to conform to the theory.
Case Studies in Ideological Failure
Marxism predicted proletarian revolution in advanced capitalist states. Instead, those states democratized and raised living standards. The response? Declare the workers "false conscious" or blame imperial interference. The theory also could not explain the emergence of a growing, politically moderate middle class—so it created the category of the "petit bourgeoisie," a rhetorical wastebin for those who failed to fit neatly into the oppressed-oppressor binary. This allowed Marxists to dismiss the aspirations, agency, or needs of the middle class as either reactionary or irrelevant.
Post-colonial theory should see Israel as a triumph of indigenous return. But after Israel's triumph in 1967, the theorists were uncomfortable with victory over Arabs who were viewed as "more" indigenous. So the theory rebranded Jews as white settlers and Israel as "settler colonialist" - a category that no one applied to Israel before 1967. Similarly, the countries of South America, which gained independence in the early 19th century, present a challenge to post-colonial categories. Rather than acknowledge the limitations of the framework, the theory pivots to ideas like "internal colonialism," where creole elites are cast as colonizers despite being native-born. Entire histories of local complexity are flattened to fit the model.
Critical Race Theory cannot explain the success of Jewish or Asian communities, or the antisemitism that emerges from other minorities. So it reclassifies these groups as "white-adjacent" to keep the model intact, even if it requires erasing their distinct histories of persecution.
Identity Politics proclaims that only the oppressed may speak on justice. But when internal dissent arises from within minority communities, it is dismissed as betrayal, not evidence.
In every case, empirical contradictions are ignored, minimized or reprocessed into ideological fuel. New jargon is invented to plug leaks in the framework, not to update or repair it.
The Jewish Exception: When Theories Break
Across these modern ideologies, there is one case that poses a unique and persistent problem: the Jews - and especially the Jewish state. Again and again, the existence of Jews defies ideological categorization in these rigid systems. Jews are both historically oppressed and disproportionately successful. They are both indigenous to the Land of Israel and accused of being foreign colonizers of the same land. They have been scapegoated by both the far right and the far left. No binary framework can contain them.
For Marxists, Jews were inconveniently middle-class or mercantile - neither industrial proletariat nor feudal aristocracy. Worse, they were often upwardly mobile, becoming successful through hard work, which Marxism cannot accept as a possibility. Thus the term "petit bourgeoisie" became a pejorative used to sideline and discredit Jewish shopkeepers.
For post-colonialists, Zionism should have been a triumph: a displaced people returning to their ancestral land to reclaim sovereignty. But the theory could not tolerate a non-European people exercising power, so Jews were recast as white Europeans and Israel as a settler-colonial outpost - regardless of the facts.
For CRT and identity-based ideologies, Jews violate the theories in multiple ways: by succeeding despite persecution, by being targets of hatred from other minorities, and by resisting the white/non-white dichotomy. To preserve the hierarchy, Jews are demoted from oppressed to privileged. Their suffering is downplayed. Their achievements are proof of their being oppressors. Their very visibility becomes a threat - something the ideology must explain away, denounce, or erase
And because the theories cannot adapt, they must scapegoat. Instead of admitting that Jews expose the theory’s weaknesses, the ideologies double down. The result is not just distortion. It is antisemitism. When Jews are reclassified as villains for failing to conform to the narrative, the ancient pattern of blame resurfaces in a modern vocabulary.
This is not a new failure. It is the latest chapter in a very old refusal to let Jews exist outside someone else's system.
What makes this all the more ironic is that these ideologies often present themselves as the cutting edge of modern moral evolution—enlightened, scientific, and intellectually progressive. Yet when challenged, they are more brittle than many of the religious traditions they deride as outdated. These secular ideologies lack any internal mechanism for doubt, contradiction, or change. They are more dogmatic than anything claimed to have been given by God.
Jewish Ethics: A System That Can Learn
In contrast, Jewish ethics is not built to control reality. It is built to wrestle with it.
It supports and encourages arguments and disagreement within its framework. It adapts to new realities, whether they are political, social or technological. It doesn't pigeonhole people into predefined categories but has the built in concept of repentance and self-improvement. It is not fixated on a single value but has a framework that can balance and prioritize multiple values in conflict.
This is what moral maturity looks like.
Where ideology rejects contradiction, Judaism turns contradiction into dialogue. Where ideology shames uncertainty, Judaism elevates it into wisdom.
Conclusion: Against the Theology of Theories
Ideologies that cannot learn are not ethics. They are theologies pretending to be science. They demand loyalty, not inquiry. Their rigidity is not strength, but fragility. Like all closed systems, they fear the free movement of truth.
Jewish ethics stands apart not because it is ancient, but because it remains open. It preserves a memory older than modern ideologies and offers a humility deeper than any theoretical model: that humans are flawed, truth is complex, and justice requires listening.
In an age of moral panic and ideological echo chambers, that humility may be the most revolutionary ethic of all.
Friday, May 02, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
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