Introduction

Abstract

The introduction uses a building block analogy to explain the concept of idea systems, and a computer programming analogy to explain codification. It discusses the objectives and approaches of the study. It describes the three cases of idea systems explored in this work, and how they illustrate different forms of codification.

一念天堂一念地狱

One Thought [Could Lead One To] Heaven;

One Thought [Could Lead One To] Hell.

失之毫厘 谬以千里

Miss a Centimeter; Wrong by a Thousand Miles

Ideas, by their nature, are prone to abuse.

Human beings, by their nature, are prone to abuse ideas.

Although this work can be read as a cross-disciplinary theory book, this entire project originated from an interest in answering some key questions about the human condition: Why do people end up doing what they do, and why do things happen in society the way they do? An answer is sought through an exploration of ideas.

Ideas shape the thought processes of entire societies. Powerful sets of ideas provide the tools and methods that enable humans—groups of people, not simply individuals—to travel much further and faster in thinking than otherwise possible. In situations when ideologies and idealogues run rampant or amok, extreme mass-scale social mishaps occasionally follow, and in such unfortunate circumstances many efforts to contain these situations are rendered futile. This book utilizes three cases to demonstrate how ideologies, as idea systems, operate within the contexts of human societies and shape human behavior.

The first case (Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7) covers a variety of witch-hunt movements in early modern Europe (1450 to 1750). It demonstrates a model of an idea system that is highly evidentially driven (or factually or empirically driven).

The second case (Chaps. 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13) is the futuristic, Communist Revolution led by Mao Zedong and his devoted followers in China from 1949 to 1976. It demonstrates a model of an idea system that is highly ideationally driven.

The third case (Chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18) is the U.S. War on Terror from 2001 to 2004, a far-reaching but somewhat nebulous project enacted by the George W. Bush administration. This case demonstrates a model of an idea system that is an eclectic, but extremely well-integrated, hybrid.

Using these three examples as a guide, this book demonstrates how slight differences in ideas, slowly but steadily accumulating, can misdirect not only our lives’ trajectories but also whole societies’. Such differences are not marked in the degree of logical rigor, in the quality of available evidence, or in the techniques of its acquisition. They cannot be described with simple dictums or maxims. These differences can be found in the principles unveiled in this book pertaining to how whole idea systems work. They can be found in the intricate codification decisions that people made in real-life contentious contexts.¹

The Spontaneous Formation of Ideological Ideas

Ideas proliferate wildly in today’s fast-paced public political discourse. A condition of extreme openness seems to mark the circulation of ideas—an openness that now includes ubiquitous manipulation. Pervasive and efficient manipulations, paradoxically, could mean closing minds to any objective truth while opening them to other possibilities. A guarding mechanism against intellectual anarchy has been a liberal ethic of uncensored public discourse and private deliberation. Conceptually, discursive participants are encouraged to battle openly to expose and detail the manipulative techniques used by others; audiences, for their part, are encouraged to take an active role in processing the ideas circulated, exercising “critical” and “independent” thinking.

Mechanistically, this ethic of a self-policing public discourse falls short, given the professional, systematic manipulation operating on a massive scale and the broad social range constituting the public. With the appearance of almost every new controversy, people’s ideas have converged, rapidly falling into mutually segregated camps. Actors on every side can quickly draw upon a reservoir of information, worldviews, and expressions that are loosely but systematically organized. Furthermore, there are often exemplary figures who comprehend the whole scale, the most compelling aspects, and the most dexterous uses of all resources within that reservoir. Certain figures—such as those who have exclusive informational and institutional access—could even exert disproportionate control over what flows into the reservoir. Even though most participants feel they are equal participants or active players in the discourses—including in the domain of idea manipulation and defense against manipulation—their roles and their ideas seem somewhat limited, or even predestined. It is easiest to build their ideas within established systems—and those systems are already partly designed and coordinated. Any attempt to depart from the system will be harder, thus positioning the individual to be much less equipped—and much too slow—to best other idea circulators in fast-paced conflicts.²

The ways people are manipulated into generating particular ideas with a great deal of spontaneity and free will—rigorously and passionately—relate to the contemporary and historical puzzle of “ideology.” Ideologies have never merely been small, private opinions; they are highly meaningful ideas—associated with methods of thinking and speaking, as well as emotional conduct and ways of living³—that potentially bind, divide, and motivate various institutions and collectives—especially affecting social changes during critical times. In crucial ways, ideologies condition the realities and relations in which people live.⁴ Cultural theorist Fredric Jameson recently declared: “I will need to say why Ideology… subsumes everything else in culture and the superstructures, assuming the position that religion once held for the first historians and cultural theoreticians of the West.”⁵

The techniques to create ideological control and conformity are advancing with increased experience and the technological means utilized by those who practice them. Traditional academic frameworks and approaches, conversely, seem to have run into a point of limitation. They are still useful, but they are not quite sufficient and a little too incohesive to deal with the increasingly complex ideologies generated by manipulative social actors at accelerated speed and given the current amount of informational backing. In fact, they might even be insufficient to deal with the ideologies of the past. The major point of limitation, I contend, is methodological and theoretical and intimately related to operationalization.

Scholarly Engagements with “Ideology”

Discourse theorist Teun van Dijk has formulated the most encompassing, cross-disciplinary scholarly definition I have yet encountered:

ideology is something like a shared framework of social beliefs that organize and coordinate the social interpretations and practices of groups and their members, and in particular also power and other relations between groups.

Under this umbrella definition, there have been at least three very different, ideal-typical scholarly engagements of ideology in the academic literature.⁶

The first type of engagement, exemplified by Karl Marx’s usage of the concept, embeds a clear mission of social critique. “Ideology” is a value-laden, pejorative term; it is something to be negated. In the view of Marx, the dominant classes meticulously construct and sustain ideas that ensure their own class interests. These ideas span the realms of economy, law, morality, politics, and culture. Intellectuals are often co-constructors of these ideas, but the masses typically give their consent and some even do so enthusiastically. The Marxian tradition has set the trend to define ideology as ideas and representations that are organized to mask truths, perpetuate falsehoods, enable power subjugation, conquer others, or combinations of the above. ⁷ Scholars in the traditions of cultural studies, post-Marxism, neo-Marxism, and critical theories paradigmatically seek to unveil economic, colonial, religious, political, and cultural ideologies that hinder societal liberation and potential.⁸ Reflecting or critiquing “ideologies” is their endeavor to improve social conditions by helping society resolve contradictions via philosophical reflection and praxis.⁹

A second type of engagement deliberately deals with ideology in a non-pejorative and non-evaluative way. This “neutral conception” of ideology is synonymous with “‘systems of thought’, ‘systems of belief’ or ‘symbolic systems’ which pertain to social action or political practice.” ¹⁰ Supposedly this is the original meaning of ideology, as coined by French thinker Antoine Destutt de Tracy in 1796 to refer to his vision of a new science that would “[regulate] society in such a way that [humans find] there the most help and the least possible annoyance from [their] own kind.”¹¹ Every set of philosophical ideas, as well as cohesive moral or spiritual beliefs used toward organizing social-cultural relations more generally, would fit under this neutral conception.¹² Scholars could be studying the “ideology” of a group without meaning to criticize the ideas of any particular actor or institution as problematic. One can see ideology as potentially offering both positive and negative functions.¹³

The third type of engagement—and probably the largest and most underacknowledged—does not use the term ideology at all (or does so only sparingly) but actually engages with ideology in theorization, critiques, or empirical inquiries. The works by Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, and Stuart Hall are prominent examples in the field of social theory.¹⁴ So too are the many scholarly and practical studies that substantively address how certain sets of developed ideas are linked to the development of societal power, which in turn shapes social formations and institutions.¹⁵

Diverse definitions and engagement approaches are not problems in themselves.

One practical problem is, however, present for all scholars: ideology is a concept that is hard to operationalize in an analysis. When “ideology” is grasped through its individual elements, empirically or theoretically, we often cease to look at it as a whole but instead as truncated parts. While ideology can be easily referred to as a holistic entity, it is of limited use in scholarship if we can only interact with and think of it as a conflated whole. This is a “gestalt problem” related to cognition and to sociology at large.¹⁶ While the production and distribution of ideologies in the field of practice are hardly curtailed by this scholarly hurdle, this problem causes dulls and stalls many scholarly efforts.

Utilities of a System Perspective

The use of a system metaphor (or a system perspective) is a way to operationalize ideology in social research and analysis. To be sure, a system metaphor is not always the most suitable tool for such analysis. Some occasions call for scholars to identify hidden ideologies or critique existing ones in broad terms rather than analyze their mechanics. A system metaphor is most useful after the initial stage of recognition. It excels in helping us make sense of the organizational aspects of ideologies and to delineate the time, place, and manner of ideological activation. This is preferable for scholars who wish to view ideologies from the perspective of a designer or practitioner. A vehicle driver or seller needs only to deal with an automobile as a whole, whereas a mechanic or anyone who is seeking to fix a car would find it more beneficial to know how the entire vehicle is constructed through its component parts. Previous scholarly works have enabled us to develop a method to empirically examine the specific, organizational aspects of ideology.¹⁷

The initial problem concern which motivated my adoption of a system perspective arose from a ubiquity of ideological content. During early moments of my research, my inquiries were repeatedly curtailed by an inability to clearly delineate causal relationships between ideology and social relations, for almost every historical account of the Great European Witch Hunts offers a wealth of materials related to “ideology”—religious, gender, class-based, national, local, legal, folk ideas, and so forth. In light of such ubiquity, it becomes difficult to discern what elements do not obtain an ideological character. Consequently, it is challenging to conceptualize which factors were stimulating or mitigating the extreme dynamics during the witch hunts; counteracting movements were also powered by some form of ideology.¹⁸ This problem could be analogized to a fish that cannot see the specific properties of the water (the oxygen level, microbes, pollutants, etc.) that is assisting or stunting its development. It is one thing to reveal a hidden ideology that people are unaware of—which previous scholars tend to emphasize—and another one entirely that people can see it everywhere but yet cannot delineate any problematic elements “hidden” in it. The system metaphor then emerged, which can serve several functions to help resolve the research problems.

Considering the Dynamic Part-Whole Relations

In an ideology, multiple subcomponents have a fluctuating presence and relevance. Their effects and significance are not constant, and their appearances are always intermixed with the shifting presence of other subcomponents.¹⁹ We should therefore strive to specify (or argue) which particular parts (mechanisms) were the most salient—or could potentially be salient—in causing an effect at a given time (when those parts exist in combinative forms with many other ones). The same electric capacitor may serve the same function for a vehicle; yet the same cannot be said of words or a chess move. The part-whole relations, in other words, are far more slippery and fluctuating.

Nonetheless, these dynamic, fluid part-whole relations can be discovered and illustrated to some extent. A pragmatic-linguist can analyze word usage in context; a chess-game analyst can explain the relevance of each player’s moves in the context of a game. Scholars also can sketch out the shape of a running system of ideas that has many divisive parts while also, at the same time, studying the dynamic processes in which particular acts of activation are engaged. One effort this book has made is to present the analysis in a structural form (through visual diagrams and displays), alongside on-the-ground, situated structuring processes, to make the system and its operational logic clear, visible, and intelligible.²⁰

Delineating Causal Relationships

Once we can see how an ideology is organized, we can determine which parts of the components or organizing processes have led to an outcome. Consequently, we can conduct more careful considerations about causation.²¹ To use the analogy of a fish again, we can move away from judging whether “water” in general—or a specific pool of water—is good or bad for the fish, to the question of analyzing why this is the case.²² Suppose the Chinese Communist Revolution has led to both gains and shortfalls, and we want to know why. We can thus dissect and assess the relative role of different ideologies’ constitutive components and processes, weighing them against other ones. Although this book does not address this question very explicitly, readers can compare the roles of several factors (variables): (a) the content of the ideology (i.e., the Communist vision); (b) Mao’s personal leadership; (c) the Party’s bureaucratic structure after the Revolution; (d) the upper-leadership of the Party; (e) specific government policy; (f) the material conditions of the nation; (g) the cognitive, discursive institutions present; (h) the agency of the masses (the peasants and the working class); and (i) external factors. We can consider which of the factors (mechanisms)—in which interactive combinations with one another and when—play which kind of role. After doing so, we could more confidently determine which of the above variables seem to play the role of a root cause—a cause which has a primacy that influences other ones in leading to positive or negative outcomes—the roles of conditional, peripheral, catalytic, or inhibitive causes. Each of these “variables,” such as “cognitive, discursive institutions,” could further be broken down or not, depending on the analytical argument.

These procedures can prove useful beyond formal academic analyses. Many individuals and groups commit their politics, morality, and actions in accordance with the ways that they attribute causation. Many ideological actors can even mobilize targets by suggesting causal linkages. By clarifying our vision of the ideology and delineating its components and processes, we can understand how actors manipulate social views regarding causal relationships with greater precision.

Identifying Situated, Competent, Artfulness Ideological Works

By applying our understanding of the intricate configurations of an idea system, we can better evaluate the artfulness of different social actions in context. In particular, we can interpret their significance in the context of a rather long chain of actions or interactions within a dynamic, large-scale system whose conditions change over time. Indeed, ideological constructions and activations are not performed in isolation, but are rather chained together in collaborative processes involving multiple actors over time. For example, an accuser in a witch trial may later use codified language to describe an event as evidence, then respond to counter-evidence, and subsequently become involved in one or more other witch trials. Although the topic itself may be said to encompass the beliefs of a codified system, and thereby considered ideological, the personal acts of exaggeration, further exaggeration, walking back previous claims, then recasting events, and so on would be amiss from inquiries if we only observe these actions in isolation. In face-to-face interaction, very subtle actions—like pausing for a few seconds more than usual—would nonetheless be understood by others.²³ In all our cases, the significance of subtle changes in depictions cannot be judged by the magnitude of changes; the actions’ significance—as well as their competence and artfulness—could only be understood if we have a basic sketch of an interactional series.

Sociologist Hugh Mehan, who has a background in conducting this moment-to-moment analysis of face-to-face interactions, pioneered this effort through collaborations with colleagues in an experiment to treat international discourse as a site for such interactions between institutions at the time of the nuclear arms race during the Cold War.²⁴ Statements between multiple actors were examined in rough, temporally situated sequences—and retold by the researchers regarding the subtle implications of sign use.

In this book, the War on Terror case is the most exemplary in terms of borrowing from his trailblazing work (since the available data afford this mode of analysis the most). Ideology was manipulated by a central actor—the George W. Bush administration. By using a system metaphor alongside an “interactional” analysis, my case analysis aims to convey that the practice of ideological constructions and activations is often accompanied by intricate alteration and recoding (such as a slight change in interpretation or lexicon), done in small increments, with profound coherence and continuity. Artful, cognitive work was first put in to connect the 9/11 attacks to a cast of characters within a storyline based on past events,²⁵ and then substantiate such a connection (al Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan) using selective information, and then announce a list of political demands that were unlikely to be satisfied, and then formulate an official reaction to the Taliban’s response, and so on, for a period of around three years. These chains of artful actions, carried out by skillful ideological actors, were largely imperceptible despite being conducted in plain sight. President Bush and his administrators appeared to carry out acts—in a rather brash manner—that were so obviously “ideological,” “unreasonable,” “dishonest,” and “biased” that their actual artful practices were severely underdiscussed. So many practices warranted critique, and more obvious problems overshadowed the subtler ones²⁶ Successful manipulation ensued because, ironically, the bold, brazen aspects of the ideology disguised the intricate, significant ones.

Definition and Characterization of Idea Systems

For the purposes of this book, I define “idea systems” as a set of ideas that are related to one another as a system and, as such, will have a distinct set of superordinate operational principles and dynamics that cannot be completely reduced to the individual ideas or other smaller elements that constitute it; the system is inscribed in the complex relations between the parts and the whole.

Invisible Control of Building Block Patterns

A brief building block analogy may capture my working idea of the dynamic nature of ideological manipulation. My heuristic model resembles the building blocks of a toy construction kit being given to a population to “spontaneously” form a structure. These pieces happen to fit together into a cohesive whole: some pieces can be joined together to make a house, while others can create a garden. Over time, more pieces are added until grand structures become possible. If we, as builders of such constructions, look to the works of our fellows, we may find their creations similar to our own. While they may use and position their pieces differently, perhaps even nefariously, with some pieces painted over or superglued, the resulting structures resemble one another simply because they share identical and recognizable elements. In contrast, the building blocks provided by another manufacturer may not fit as well; forcefully using them may make the final product look shoddy or even strange.

There are advantages to working with such predesigned pieces, namely their ease of use. With such elements, we are able to spontaneously construct grand, polished, and familiar products. The disadvantage, however, is the structural vulnerability to manipulation by manufacturers and distributors. To extend this metaphor to a public discourse, we may be highly intelligent, creative, or even critical users of the system. But as interlocutors, to what extent is our dialogue derivative of structural designs? Can we insert a green color into our constructions naturally when all the building blocks given to us are blue? What can we do when certain pieces, which could have formed inextricable linkages, are conspicuously missing or damaged?

Analogous to the limitations implemented by the metaphorical toy manufacturers are the limitations shaping public ideas. Although the potential pools of resources are extensive, only a much smaller pool of resources is provided to idea-makers at any given point in time. In other words, institutional filtering processes limit the options available for use in formulating ideas. A societal culture, for example, can filter out many potentially useable pieces—so could powerful people and organizations.²⁷ Other natural circumstances, such as the limitations of people’s innate cognitive capacity, can also induce filtering. Aside from these externally imposed factors, individual idea-makers also actively attend to selected happenings, choose codes and information, and deliberately draw upon limited knowledge bases for their conclusions. These are small-scale acts of filtering, which postdate the external filtering processes.

Observing and Deconstructing Codification

An especially critical part of forming ideas are the processes associated with “codification.” Though it is a broad term with multifold definitions, codification, for the purposes of this text, refers to the broad range of processes of designing, selecting, and utilizing codes (i.e., conventionalized sets of symbols) toward the task of idea-making.²⁸

Integrating an analogy from computer programming can help us visualize the form this codification may take. Computer programmers use specialized languages to give instructions to computers. The rules embedded in the languages (the conventions) are called codes; the specific command lines (the symbols) written within the language are also referred to as codes.²⁹ To “crack the code” is to successfully understand the rules of a computer program, by way of its computerized language. “Writing code” is the work performed by programmers who input strings of symbols, or command lines, into a program to optimize its design and functionality. Despite the slightly varied usage of the term, as it may reference either rules specifically, or symbols generally, we will consider codes, summarily, as conventionalized sets of symbols.

Humans’ symbolic processes are far more dynamic than those of computer programs. We can use a program to make all computers process symbols (“think”) in the same way; it is much more difficult with humans. Applications inherently afford a certain amount of creative freedom. A word processor minimally determines the content of what words are written; a video game is more restrictive, nonetheless actors are “free” to act in the game to an extent granted to them by the maker. Under some circumstances, people can also select which applications to use or subvert their uses, and some can even “hack” the code of a program to alter the otherwise uniformly designed applications. Precisely because of this reason, how idea systems can often generate streamlining patterns of thinking in our society is especially fascinating—particularly among supposedly creative free thinkers who seem to come up with the converging thoughts on their own agency.

People’s words, appearances, and behaviors can look and sound original—but one may not appreciate just how unoriginal they are until they are viewed in terms of the patterns in which they fit with others. A certain male gun rights activist who denigrated another as a “two-bit whore for Fidel Castro,” declared that dissenting parties could “suck on my machine gun,” expressed that he wanted to shoot obvious attackers dead with “no court case,” and screamed “freedom” to articulate his repressed desire may be revered as an original orator, but this person could simply be repeating a streamlined model of thoughts and political expressions. Alternatively, he could be a minor innovator who revises some thoughts and expressions for others to emulate.³⁰

We do not have to determine this identity in great detail; more central to our inquiry is the structure of active programming as indicated by such expressions. We can obtain a sense of this structure through the analysis of the codes and the codification processes in which multiple cultural actors exercise “agency” in composing their thoughts. This includes the methodical ways of converting, storing, retrieving, and employing a set of conventionalized symbols to process information.³¹ Proficient cultural actors who are familiar with nearly every aspect of a program can do much more with codes than those who are less knowledgeable. And there are always a few cultural actors who know the codes so well that they can creatively rewrite them, thus binding others by the codes that they compose.³²

Codification, therefore, is central to the analysis of this text. We want to analyze not only the finished products fabricated from conceptual building blocks but also the properties of the individual pieces and the conditions determining their properties. We will not limit our examination to ideological panoramas, or the basic contents and forms of ideological constructions. Instead, we will extend our analysis to the intricate processes of ideological construction, and the structural organization of the specific elements utilized in this construction. Therefore, to effectively demonstrate the principles and applications of idea systems, this text must engage its analytical subjects at the level of codification.

Seven Domains of Components for Idea Construction

To add precision to this mode of analysis, this book delineates seven loosely connected domains of components relevant to the formation of idea systems, the full logic of which will be explained in Chap. 2. These seven domains are (1) happenings (or raw reality); (2) pre-coded information; (3) codes; (4) coded information (or specific mental objects or coded things); (5) data; (6) ideas; and (7) idea systems. This conceptual scheme will guide my analysis of codification in this book. The system of terminologies can also be used as a starting instrument to analyze a broad range of idea systems.

Without being too specific for now, I will use just one example from this book’s case studies to convey how the scheme works. The U.S. War on Terror was based and developed upon a set of larger ideas rooted in the nation’s historic roles in combatting certain uncivilized, evil forces, thus bringing forth freedom, perpetual peace, and light to the world (idea system). The interpretation of the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein in Iraq was one of the main propositions, elaborated with many other sub-propositions (ideas). These ideas likely have their support, such as the ambiguous signs (data) indicating the possibility of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and collaboration with terrorists. Looking into the pool of data provided, one could find specific facts or things (coded information) one after another, such as satellite photos of moving trucks and the presence of terrorists in Iraq. Each such object consists of the application of certain conventionalized words (codes) like “mobile biological research laboratories,” which were used to describe some form of messy, unadulterated information (pre-coded information), indicating the existence of those objects, such as eyewitness accounts. The actual raw reality (happening)—pertaining to what had actually taken place in Iraq, what took place behind the scenes of informational gathering and processing—may involve puzzles we cannot solve, but the asserted ideas were purported to correspond to this state of raw reality.

The aforementioned example is a case where a string of correspondence exists between the seven domains. The stabilized definitions and analytical distinctions can help us more precisely consider the level at which departures and disagreements may arise. Departures in selecting pre-coded information are different from departures in selecting codes to be applied. Recklessly marrying codes and information is different from using data selectively to substantiate ideas. Scholars should ideally be prepared to scale their analysis at different levels. Such precise pinpointing is needed when we are no longer generally viewing ideas by their contents but rather by their structural relationships with one another within the context of idea systems.

Social Actors Who Design, Manipulate, and Activate Idea Systems

Let us now move on to social actors—including institutions or institutional spokespersons that play the role of actors³³—who design, control, activate, and use idea systems for manipulative purposes.

First, manipulation can have an innocent definition—simply a reference to skilled, “handful” application, such as when we say that a pottery artist is manipulating the clay via pinching. But our use of the term from now on will be connected to the critical sense of the word—the abusive usage of social power. A typical manipulative actor is one who skillfully controls or influences others to accomplish selfish ends, even at the expense of other people’s autonomy, interest, or well-being.³⁴

Then, there are nuanced differences between these social actors. Although these social actors’ roles in real-life scenarios are often overlapping, these identities should be conceptually separated. Based on my inductive analysis in this book, I delineate three general kinds of social actors—three casts of characters—that exist in most publicly circulated idea systems: (A) active, grand-scale manipulators or designers; (B) small-time manipulators, and (C) passive, conduit-like users and activators. The differences between three kinds may primarily be measured by their innovativeness, and secondarily by their influence.

Active, Grand-Scale Manipulators or Designers

The first kind actually manages to develop an internally cohesive chain-complex of information, codes, objects, evidence, and ideas with the backing of epistemic authorities. They play a significant part in innovating and designing. The reach of their social power helps them accomplish these grand-scale tasks. They do not merely make minor revisions but actually inject significant modifications into existing epistemic resources, and in doing so they “give birth” to a whole system of ideas which is equipped with its own logic, dynamic, and “life cycle.” These parties have an interest in monitoring the holistic shape and conditions of the whole idea system with a long time-horizon, making interventions and changes as needed.

Small-time Manipulators

Small-time manipulators of an idea system merely need to make minor adaptations to existing ones, perhaps intermixing the works of several others. Their influences, however, are not to be neglected. When the power of the big-time manipulators is dim, the power of small-time manipulators comparatively shines. These people can exist within bureaucracies, political parties, local institutions, villages, and even families and peer networks, where they already have a compartmentalized purview of power. When these actors activate idea systems, they can do more than simply twisting them a little; they can instead manipulate them to accomplish twisted ends. As this study will show, selectively changing a few pieces of information or words, inserting a slight bias here and there, can significantly alter the outcomes of idea-making if the actors understand the principles of the idea system and its codification. Cumulatively, these actors’ deeds can distort the shape and conditions of whole idea systems.

Passive, Conduit-Like Users and Activators

The third kind of people, passive users and activators, do not play an active part in changing, developing, or altering idea systems. These agents can be situated in big or small institutions. They mainly accept and reproduce them as they appear; hence, they are conduits of others. Their understanding of codification need not be comprehensive. Even if they are loud in voice or stylish in presentation—hence seeming to be usually “active” and “creative”—their modes of activation involve little true originality other than peripheral elaboration. Thus, even if such people—like bombastic television anchors—influence others by the thousands and millions, they do not actively condition idea systems in significant ways. By no means do I mean that these actors are socially passive; they are merely passive in their innovation. These actors can foster extreme dynamics through their acts of amplification.

This typology of actors can help readers see the social interactions that occur in the case stories. We can see the agents not as particularized individuals but rather as historical subjects who bear differing relations to idea systems. Some of them might have exceptional mastery in combatting others who have less, and some actors might actually be surprisingly responsible and reasonable toward others even if they also activated idea systems.

Moreover, we should also be cognizant of the fact that once an idea system is widely diffused in society, it is often not under any actor’s absolute control. The historical record offers countless examples wherein entire systems of ideas are radically transformed to the point of serving inadvertent purposes, becoming utterly unmanageable in the process. When a sophisticated idea system becomes corrupted, so too will the identity and actions of the individuals who subscribe to it. The task of remedying the situation could be onerous because a sophisticated system tends to have many relative advantages to vanquish less developed ideas and discourses. When manipulators lose control of their creation, they may find themselves shackled to the malignant iterations of their initially constructive idea systems.

Methodological Choices to Study Idea Systems

This book employs and alternates between several strategies in the study of codification. Each of these strategies has a methodological consideration.

The first strategy is a focus on intelligent social cognition. I try to examine especially intelligent manipulations and applications of idea systems—by actors who demonstrate a high-level mastery of codification.³⁵ The ways in which dexterous parties interact or vie with one another can reveal a lot about the principles of idea systems’ operation. In contrast to those parties, the simpler, standardized, routine maneuvers are easier to comprehend.

The second strategy is an attempt to relate to some real-life, situated, and situational contexts, as afforded by the data. Sometimes, the sense of why something could be said but was not, what informational and intellectual resources are realistically available for people to make ideas, or what real-life consequences are implied when certain words are used to describe an object, cannot be fully appreciated unless we can examine the codification processes in light of those contexts.³⁶ People are often existentially tied to small groups, families, and friends in their communities; interpretations of their behaviors would be much richer if we can consider such real-life contexts to an extent.³⁷

The third is an attempt to compare across different texts and cases. This entails a deliberate effort to collect data that represent contrasting “voices”—and to look at them through texts. Often, many accounts appeared to be so internally coherent, sensible, and intelligent that their arbitrariness was not easily discovered. Comparing across codification processes—especially in disagreeing voices about the same phenomena, in real-life interaction with one another—can help us see how there are often other possible ways to think about, speak upon, and act toward a phenomenon.³⁸ In so doing, we can more easily see people as dynamic, cognitively endowed agents in society—even if they are users of their cultural repertories.³⁹ Lastly, by looking at similarities between idea systems that run across cases and as well as analyzing the variance, this approach helps to repeatedly demonstrate the common principles of multiple idea systems as well as the power of peculiar designs.⁴⁰

The fourth is an attempt to study longitudinal patterns associated with codification. Certain patterns can only be revealed through a longitudinal approach. For example, evidential accumulation and its culmination are longitudinal outcomes—with the passage of time, more affirming and disaffirming evidence would emerge. Interactions and events are also longitudinal in nature. Activators of idea systems engage in extended, chained efforts of idea-making over time. The profound twists and turns of events, interactions, and the resultant transformations of idea systems can only be accounted for by a longitudinal approach.⁴¹ Lastly, the cyclical momentum of ideas can only be observed longitudinally.⁴² Even if this book’s analysis is not sufficient to study a whole “life-cycle” duration of an idea system, we can gain insights by observing how idea systems operate through smaller cycles—their initial ascendance and subsequent consequences, the adaptation and transformation, their decline and the respective causes. A summary of these life-cycle characteristics will be provided at the end of the book.

Last but not least, this book veers toward a holistic, rather than a specialized, approach, even as it seeks to provide the tools for readers to see how specialized parts relate to the whole. Further elaboration on this point will be provided shortly.

Three Cases of Idea Systems

As stated in the beginning of this chapter, this book examines three major cases of idea systems that are typified as evidentially driven, ideationally driven, and hybrid—each of which has a distinct, ornate structure with a different set of contents. Each case highlights a unique set of codification processes that have contemporary relevance. Each case shows how actual, creative people use all the mental and physical efforts they can muster to activate the potential of idea systems to their limits.

The term “witch hunt” is now customarily used as a convenient catch-all phrase. Mainly, people use it to label certain accusations and prosecutions driven by actions comparable to those of hysterical and ill-informed mobs. If we research the actual history, however, the witch hunts in early modern Europe were actually driven by a surprising amount of evidence. Many convincing “facts,” mixed with ambiguous information, were compiled both locally and interregionally across Europe. Ideas pertaining to witchcraft, witches, and diabolic entities were often refined in debates that involved complex activities of empirical proof. Instead of sketching how barbaric irrationality had catalyzed witch hunts, the case study highlights how extremely rigorous yet creative codification activities drove these hunts. These activities organized numerous, extraordinary empirical happenings into a reservoir of evidence, making a vast, seemingly preposterous idea real. Hence, I highlight how the idea system was evidentially driven. The principles are highly applicable to today’s information age. We still draw linkages between many kinds of information. We still observe correlative patterns. We certainly still care about coherence in our ideas. These chapters speak to these themes.

The Chinese Communist Revolution, in large part carried out by Mao Zedong and his followers between 1949 and 1976, was sustained by an idea system of a different kind. The revolutionaries put into place an elaborate set of visionary ideas—partly appealing to believable social theories and partly to futuristic ideals and self-evident truisms. This idea system was so comprehensive that it was used to guide national and local policies, and even specific personal and familial affairs. Physical evidence was not as important in this mode of codification. Rather, interpreting how actions, facts, and phenomena fitted into the organized systems of visions and images was more salient in constructing arguments about who the moral actors were, what mistakes were committed, what needed to be done, and how the larger idealized project proceeded. Hence, I characterize the idea system as being highly ideationally driven. The principles revealed attest to so many ideas being formulated from absolute, idealistic visions based on sound logic and embellished with impeccable face value. We cannot help observe these visions proliferating in various global localities today.

The case of the U.S. War on Terror illustrates how today’s political actors are proficient at both kinds of codification, capable of making creative, efficient, hybrid forms. Most of today’s controversial political ideas are neither based exclusively on evidentiary claims nor on idealistic visions, but are instead a dynamic combination of and alternation between the two. The marriage of the two processes in their codification, however, is an intricate, tricky process. In particular, the codification needs to be seamlessly integrated with modern systems of information gathering, expert institutions, international conversations, and “open” media interrogation. The proficient activation of the War on Terror idea system can be glimpsed in the ways the Bush administration made aggressive political demands on foreign governments; the way it found vessels of evidentiary “facts” to sustain the notion of an enemy’s depravity; the way it constructed and verified the empirical problems in question; the way it justified enormous financial and human costs; and, lastly, the way party politicians, within the context of mutual rivalries, used the same idea system to exploit war-related national scandals to their favor on the public stage, while reinforcing the idea system as a whole. The works are not only performed by politicians. We see people constructing flexible, hybrid forms of ideas on a daily basis; and sometimes only by intermixing codification modes can people build such magnificent constructions than if they are only limited to one set of methods.

Academic, Humanistic, and Practical Connections

This book is primarily written to target a cross-section of specialists, learned audiences, and advanced students. Many original academic terminologies have very specific, qualified meanings. Words like “codes,” “frames,” “schemas,” “information,” “narratives,” “events,” “symbols,” “culture,” and many other concepts are prime examples of this. Accordingly, I have standardized and streamlined a set of several dozen terminologies and used them consistently. These terminologies are assembled as a small toolbox of starting instruments for a newcomer to deconstruct a range of idea systems in a step-by-step manner. If readers follow the cases in this book, they can experience connecting microscopic pictures of discourse and large-scale social significance. Technical references will be sprinkled throughout the text for readers interested in the entry points to explore some of the territories inhabited by specialists.

By integrating multiple tools and using the five previously explained methodological strategies, this book seeks to create a wider bridge between the abstract and concrete approaches, and seemingly “microscopic” and “macroscopic” investigations.⁴³ It hopes to make use of some of the precise instruments cultivated by discourse analysts, semioticians, ethnographers, linguists, and interactionists, by relating them to the concerns and questions on a grand scale—such as the flow of dialectical change, the causality of historical events, and the question of societal order.

By using three cases that involve considerable human costs, I hope the stories told here will alert readers to the detrimental potential of codification and the danger of ostensibly appealing idea systems. Some problematic forms of idea-making may even be recognizable in our own practice. The cases represent a geographic, topical, and temporal balance—covering Europe, China, and the United States during different periods. Idea systems encompassing religion, politics, and science are incorporated. I hope this arrangement will maximize the book’s cross-cultural, cross-situational, and cross-institutional applicability. The framework is meant to be flexibly scalable, meaning that it can be applied to national ideologies as well as to the social psychology of individuals.

Engaging Ideological Problems in the Present Time

Relating to the current scene of public political discourse, many potent, dangerous techniques of idea-making documented in this book are conspicuous. The term “post-truth” has been used by some authors to broadly describe the conditions of today’s public political discourse: an institutionalized space that seems to be filled with bold-faced lies, one-sided information, deliberate omissions, and pornographic appeals to sensations and emotions, all coupled with a general lack of an effective mechanism of self-correction. ⁴⁴

Similar “post-truth” conditions can be seen in many past historical eras: a general debilitation of an ethic of truth commitment within the epistemic culture, accompanying a callous, cavalier ethos of constructing and circulating ideas—including ideas that relate to truth, fantasy, value, and aesthetics. The social abuse of ideas that so often alarms third-party observers, however, may not always be noticeable by the social actors who practice it or the audience to which the ideas are directed. Contrary to seeing “big lies” as having a brazen presence, I see that insidious manipulation tends to hide “the devil” within the subtlest of details. Outwardly innocent, yet prevalent in our discourse, are piecemeal operations (of codification) committed by social actors. These operations involve slightly substantiated evidence that could burn in the mind, cunning analogies that carry exceptionally malicious implications, and nonchalant speculations that actually seem reasonable at almost every step, yet, somehow, they build upon one another to create cumulative effects that potently enable destructive ends. When working together, these operations can maintain a questionable order during settled times, and, in addition, contribute to the making of unsettled ones.⁴⁵ The three stories in this book demonstrate these dynamics.

In some respects, our current trying times are distinct from many past ones. The techniques of cognitive manipulation have become so much more advanced, and informational and communicative technologies have become so much more widespread, that efforts of idea manipulations have seen accelerated development. ⁴⁶ Even children are increasingly co-opted players and audiences in the new propaganda institution. Textbooks and syllabi on propaganda tend to feature World War II propaganda as the classic, extreme example. Many scholars, however, are aware that the pinnacle of propaganda and disinformation in human history thus far is not the World War II period; it is here, now.

Rather than critiquing the specific manifestations or advocating for one specific set of rules, this book seeks to call attention to an enduring problem regarding the nature of both ideas and humans. Returning to the two sayings quoted in the epigraph of this chapter, this book is about the moments of significance when people hold strong ethics and great diligence toward a single thought as well as—on the flip side—get ideas wrong inch by inch. Such problematic natures ingrained in human epistemology occasionally lurk in society—often quite visibly in societies taken over by ideas. For the parts of the problems that this book fails to capture in any words, I hope it provides hints as to their dark shadows looming in the background.