Think Deeper Than Politics And Renounce Ideology

Tuesday, 29 July 2025, 7:39 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

In an unsettling article entitled, “How humans got addicted to faking the natural world,” Zed Nelson starkly states, “Just 3% of the world’s land remains ecologically intact.” But he conventionally concludes his otherwise thoughtful piece by declaring that “It is on an industrial and political level that change needs to happen.”

Politics is the outermost disorder arising from the human psyche and the globalized culture. Continuing to view the human crisis in terms of political lenses, whether the ruling capitalist, increasingly authoritarian lens, or the progressive lens, prevents change.

As humankind slides toward a “tech-obsessed fascist future,” boilerplate progressive analysis has become a theatre of the absurd, repeating nonsense such as, “We explore alternatives rooted in queer, Indigenous, and Marxist standpoints.” Right-wing extremists easily dismiss such idealistic blather, which has no relationship to what’s actually happening in the world.

To make everything political is to render every field a battlefield. For example, it’s a fool’s errand to insist we must “fold political analysis into scientific inquiry in a way that makes science more multifaceted and more honest.”

Politics is the art of dissembling and manipulation, and must be kept out of science as much a possible. That doesn’t mean we should ignore the history of eugenics, patriarchy and speciesism that has often characterized the history of science. It means that we need to look deeper than countering prevailing ideologies with philosophically and spiritually empty “alternative” ideologies.

The idea that “science thrives when its advocates are shrewd politicians but suffers when its opponents are better at politics” is as wrongheaded as an idea can be. It is the antithesis of the way ahead, for science, for the individual, and for humanity.

The wisdom of Epicurus still applies: at times like these, avoid political turmoil and value the inquiry and insight of true friendship.

Philosophy, which is the pursuit of insight through inquiry, comes before science, and spirituality, which is the awakening of Mind without thought, comes before philosophy. The rightful accumulation of knowledge is not the point of either philosophy or the inner life, but of science.

The intent and goal of science is to be as objective and politically neutral in the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge as possible. To say, “scientists must reckon explicitly with the ways in which the knowledge they produce, and the processes by which they produce it, are already and unavoidably political” is to condemn humankind to the tech-obsessed fascist future that progressive ideologues purport to remedy.

Any scientist worth her salt will tell you that if s/he has to “grapple with her own political perspectives constantly” she’ll be unable to do science. Grapple with political perspectives if you will, but if we cannot keep politics out of science, we will stymie scientific advancement.

Of course, the reality is that the most scientifically advanced nation on Earth is turning totalitarian, and is well down the road of jackhammering the foundations of its scientific advances.

However, the remedy is not to make science more political, anymore than it is to make politics more scientific. The remedy is to free ourselves of ideology, whether of the dominant right or the doctrinaire left.

The philosophical assertion that knowledge is inherently and unavoidably political is the product of political deformation. It allows no space for the true remedies of the inner life, philosophy and friendship.

To “call upon scientists to put our imaginations to work differently, in ways that move us through this nightmare portal into a dreamier world, where justice is not cropped out of scientific endeavors but rather centered and celebrated,” is to continue to give erroneous primacy to science, and call for living in a dream world of illusion, ignorance and ineffectuality.

We return to first things – the momentum of man’s destruction of the ground on which we stand, the air we breathe and the water we drink – the momentum of the so-called Anthropocene Age.

Man did not begin decimating the Earth with the Industrial Revolution, or even with the Agricultural Revolution. We are the same humans we were during the innumerable centuries of Indigenous times; we just lived under daily threat from and awareness of nature, and lacked the technology to dominate and “conquer” the wilderness.

Therefore it is most certainly not on “the political level that change needs to happen,” but on the level of radical change and transmutation within individuals as microcosms of human consciousness as a whole.

With only 3% of wilderness left on Earth, and the obscenely globalized Disneyfication of our relationship to nature, the obsession with the political dimension is small-minded.

Limiting ourselves to the ludicrously limited borders of politics, and insisting that we “must” embrace this or that ideology to avoid a future that’s already here and now, is philosophically obtuse and inwardly irresponsible.

We have to face and remain with what is, within and without, before we can begin to imagine, create and build a different world.

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail