Ideologies as epistemic closures

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“expansion and political success will be seriously hampered, if the truth of the Gnostic movement  is permanently exposed to effective criticism from various quarters. This handicap can be reduced, and practically eliminated, by putting a taboo on the instruments of critique; a person who uses the tabooed instruments will be socially boycotted and, if possible, exposed to political defamation.” — Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, p. 140

If you understand this point, you can understand cancel culture, and much more concerning ideological movements. Why are the “woke” pointing to the use of logical arguments as “white supremacy“? Because an ideology relies on epistemic closure, and needs blocking tactics to keep out ideas that might open it to reality.

This also fully explain something like Maury Rothbard’s “review” of Karl Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation: for anyone who has given Polanyi’s book a serious reading, Rothbard’s “review“ appears as an absurd mischaracterization of what the book contains. But if you think that Rothbard was off his game or something in writing the review, you have misunderstood what it was for. It achieved his purpose quite well: it informed his followers that this was a book that they should never look at. And if they were to ever hear anyone citing it, they could cut off that conversation with “But don’t you know that Rothbard destroyed Polanyi?”

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