Political fictions about identities

Ideological fiction has always enabled various groups of people throughout history to consolidate their positions of power. Perhaps the oldest of these, (and one which remains a contemporary fiction), is the notion that winners are born, not made. This belief that "I am a winner and deserve to be successful at all times," leads directly to scapegoating, for fate is impersonal, and nobody is a winner all the time. Yet such is the need to be seen as a born winner, that many will alight upon boat people -- desperate refugees from other countries -- to feed their frenzy for success; or upon women (i.e. in terms of right-wing ideology, those whose "natures" are already weak). The long recognisable catch-cry of the right is that it is always the most vulnerable who are to blame whenever either fate deals them a bad hand, or they happen to make fatal errors of judgment.

So it is with extreme right-wingers, who are the majority in our midst:

Flowing down, from the powerful to the least powerful, goes the blame for any project undertaken by management that does not fully succeed.

Left-liberals, by contrast, tend not to see the world as being permanently divided between born "winnas" and born "losas". This political camp tends to modify this notion (above) by introducing the sense of a permeable membrane between two states of being, such that "losas" may become "winnas" if only they try hard enough. Each institution of society is encouraged to treat those who pass through it on the basis of this useful fiction -- namely the idea that each and every one of us is already equal.

Notably it also introduces a false epistemology (although no more false than that extreme right wingers) when it presumed that every individual enters each new field of contest as if it is a level playing field. Left-liberal goals (to achieve equality within the system) are then confused with what already exists -- that is, they obviate the fact that deeply entrenched, systematic inequalities continue to exist, and make it seem as if any individual who has passed through a liberal institution has already been treated with fairness and justness.

In the final analysis, there is only one point of view that does not completely fictionalise the individual, and that is materialism. To view the individual as a material being allows that she or he is subject to various social, psychological and historical forces, which, in turn, produce his or her very being. Despite what propagandists for the other side have claimed, this perspective does not take away free will from the individual, but rather puts him or her into a context that is true to each person's experience, validating what has happened to them.

A materialist perspective is the only one that enables the individual to proclaim, "my misadventures are my own loss although I didn't necessarily have everything to do with it," whilst avoiding accepting blame from those who have power -- those who want to "win" at any cost to others.