Ideology Is Fantasy

By Leo Gura - January 5, 2025

Notice that every political ideology thinks of itself in an idealized way, better than it is in practice. Because ideology is a kind of fantasy. Each ideology sounds great in theory to its adherents, but if implemented turns out much worse, as the fantasy comes into contact with cold hard reality, as it goes from the abstraction of the mind to material existence. It’s like the difference between a plan you have in chess vs the pieces on the board. You don’t have enough understanding to see the flaws in your plan until you move the pieces, by which point its too late.

This is true of Communism/socialism/Marxism, libertarianism, nationalism/fascism/Nazism, anarchism, theocracy, capitalism, populism, etc. The self-deception happens because each ideology views itself in its idealized, theoretical, fantasy sense, not in actual implementation. But each ideology views and judges its opponent ideologies in the practical implemented sense. This is an example of the sneaky and distorting power of double-standards. This is the psychological mechanism by which Marxists, libertarians, neo-Nazis, capitalists, etc. delude themselves. You see your own ideology in its ideal but rival ideologies for all their real-world flaws.

This also applies to apolitical ideologies like religion. A Christian sees Christianity as a theoretical ideal while he sees Islam for all its real-world evils. The Christian is blind to the real-world evils of Christianity not just because he’s biased and playing favorites but more fundamentally because Christianity is a living fantasy for him. A Christian lives a fantasy but doesn’t know it. This fantasy then distorts his whole reality.

The reason a Marxist is stuck on Marxism is because he holds Marxism as an idealized fantasy that is disconnected from contact with real-world survival forces. Because survival is way too sophisticated and intelligent for a Marxist’s mind to comprehend and anticipate. The Marxist truly believes that Marxism would be a better form of government because he is oblivious to all survival problems in its implementation. Fundamentally, the issue is not that the Marxist does not understand politics, the issue is that he does not survival — which is a much deeper error. By not understanding survival he is then able to convince himself that Marxism can work, and you will never be able to talk him out of his conviction because to do that you would need to get him to understand survival, which is beyond even his area of interest and cannot be taught quickly or easily as an ideology. Survival is not an ideology. Survival is not fantasy. Ideology is so common and popular because it’s easy to teach by just feeding people ideas. But survival cannot be understood that way. Understanding survival requires extensive experience and consciousness — which takes a decade or more of work. Ideology requires nothing but a gullible mind.

But I’m not just picking on Marxists here. This is a much broader pattern. The capitalist makes the same mistake by ignoring all the failures of capitalism, by idealizing it in his mind. A staunch capitalist is living in a capitalist fantasy in his mind. The people on Wall Street are not just greedy selfish capitalists, they live in a fantasy of which they unconscious. They get paid millions to live that fantasy! Ideology is like an adult form of the fantasies that children have when they play with toys. But then people take that as reality, which results in profound self-deception and dysfunction. Wall Street brokers are basically big children playing out a very long fantasy.

This is also the case for populism.

In order to avoid this advanced trap you must cultivate the habit to press yourself to look at the failure points and nitty-gritty contact of your worldview with survival forces. You must develop a profound consciousness of survival. You must force your mind to go out of its way to falsify your own ideology rather than only do confirmation bias — which is what most people do. You need to develop a profound consciousness of what fantasy is and locate it in your mind. You have to see your ideology, like libertarianism or populism as fantasy — because that’s what it is.

Fantasy is one of the most important concepts in this work — understanding it, identifying it, deconstructing it, dropping it.

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