Imperialistic and hegemonic pursuits have been manifest from the nascent stages of human development, allowing some to enjoy unprecedented autonomy and self-constructed apotheoses (Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte might be examples) while forcing others into supplication and bondage, enervated lickspittles who are forced to either acquiesce to the Procrustean dictates of their oppressors or suffer adverse repercussions as equality and equanimity are defenestrated (if they are lucky) or, at worst, their salubrious visages turn sallow as the misanthropic malefactors divest them of their corporeal existence, leaving a concatenation of sanguinary bodies, myriad dreams and expectations stanched, as the oppressors continue on the road to genocide. While the development of most power structures (and the societal bifurcation of equality and inequality and the internecine struggles that are usually, but not categorically, concomitant to them) is not as overtly and violently exemplified as in the foregoing example, social stratification is often achieved clandestinely as brute force is superseded by the serpentine wiles and cognitive legerdemain of the disingenuous as they use lies, half-truths, and inflammatory appeals to prey upon the ignorance and prejudices of the people - they are power-hungry and elitist demagogues who use ideology to create that incontrovertible sooth called history.
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Munich, Germa...
United States
United StatesAlthough ideology may start via ubiety, that is to say, in a particular location, among a select group of people, once it is accepted ubiquitously and written down for posterity, it is extremely difficult to alter societal values and beliefs, for people are indoctrinated by what they have never experienced; to them what they are subjected to is "always already" true. There is no disputing it. As a result, most do not question ideologies, even if they seem idiosyncratic or inherently immoral, and those iconoclastic few who challenge the dictates of a societal construct that they despise face an...