Yes, it is. In fact, it is its sole function.
The dictionary tells us that manipulation means, “exerting shrewd or devious influence especially for one’s own advantage.” “Shrewd” being, in this context, “tricky”. The advantage being whatever the pseudo-politician has in mind.
Manipulation has to do with telling, plainly stated, lies.
“Truth is inconvenient for ideologues”, as Paul Craig Roberts stated in
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18339
To understand why we need first to clear up what an ideology is and why it is political.
Ideology is not philosophy. Philosophy is rational, pretends to clear up language, to find contradictions and to explain purposes and intentions; to find the truth. One of the tools philosophy uses is logic and it is the basis of the Scientific Method.
According to the dictionary, ideology is “(Government, Politics & Diplomacy) a body of ideas that reflects the beliefs and interests of a nation, political system, etc. and underlies political action.” These are not necessarily true, for data might merrily contradict the facts with no problem at all.
A political ideology is rhetorical, it can use any means to express itself in an apparent rational way, but still it is, bluntly stated, sophistry. Political in this context, refers to grabbing, preserving, conserving and using power.
“Outside power, everything is an illusion” would be the real motto of a political ideology to manipulate the masses.
A political ideology imposes its purposes by using rhetoric and sophistry; poetry and propaganda. It redefines words loading them to create certain specific meanings changing them for its own purposes, many times contradictorily. It is a set of standards and goals much like the religious dogmas, which permeate a society or a group or class of a society. What is “politically incorrect” is in fact a political ideological taboo. The order is, “you must not think this, but you must think what we told you to think.”
“The limits of my world mean the limits of my language”; Wittgenstein said it better. By controlling the limits of the language, people get under a semantic centralized control system, which determines their world; and that is a political ideology to produce a mass.
Ortega y Gasset put it clearly, “The mass-man is he whose life lacks any purpose, and simply goes drifting along. Consequently, though his possibilities and his powers be enormous, he constructs nothing. And it is this type of man who decides in our time…”
Ideology provides the purposes for those drifters.
Masses are thus born.
The masses are sheep-like, but not sheep.
For there are certain paradoxes that according with Ortega y Gasset, occur,
“The masses are incapable of submitting to direction of any kind…It is illusory to imagine that the mass-man of today, however superior his vital level may be compared with that of other times, will be able to control, by himself, the process of civilization. I say process, and not progress. The simple process of preserving our present civilization is supremely complex, and demands incalculably subtle powers. It is not a question of the mass-man being a fool. On the contrary, today he is cleverer, has more capacity of understanding than his fellow of any previous period…” http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/gasset_revolt.html
This cleverness guarantees neither any self-determination nor any truth. Thus the political leaders are confronting a huge contradiction, for being “the masses…incapable of submitting to direction of any kind”, political ideologies are intending to control them as sheep through lies. They keep forgetting that men are not sheep, though, and they keep revolting.
Democracy, then, is impossible when we use ideology, even if clever people apply for it.
Personally, I have seen very intelligent people believe the most outrageous, absurd and contradictory things, (specially, the falsity of “mental illness”) following the current political ideology imposed by the powers that be.
Marx was right when he defined ideology as “false social conscience”, as we can see with people outside their ideological limits, when dealing with the poor or the rich or people from other countries. They have a bunch of preconceived ideas, formed by the predominant ideology; made up to see just what the ideological bars allow to see, nothing else. Americans have them, Mexicans and French and Italians have them, communists have them, socialists and capitalists have them; it is a human feature, skipped by very few statesmen.
Elias Canetti tells us how the symbols of political ideology function to produce a mass,
“When people think of themselves as belonging to a nation at moments of national crisis, let us say at moments of national turmoil such as the outbreak of war, when they think of themselves as Englishmen or Frenchmen or Germans, what they have in mind is a crowd or a crowd symbol, something that they can relate to themselves.” http://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/canetti-elias-theodor-adorno-crowds-and-power/
That “crowd symbol” is politically ideological in nature and crystallizes the mass. However, masses are futile, they do not last, they disappear quickly and thus they are impossible to lead, even if political ideologies try and try.
Psychology is the tool tyrants have used along the years to create ideologies. When tyrants find a group they do not like, they create the opposite group by using political ideologies. The use of “artificial intelligence” as politically ideological “software”, in order to program individuals and masses into robots is the next step.
A political ideology thus is a set of stimulus-reaction patterns without the conscious criteria of the individual, or group, based on certain ideas that might be contradictory, and many times, are contradictory. Double-think is produced by these, as the clairvoyant George Orwell put it.
The result is cognitive dissonance. Its essence is psychology applied to the masses.
A terrific example of it is the use of the word “democracy” vs. “demagogy”.
Many authors, some of them extremely well reputed, confuse them, sometimes probably intentionally.
Abraham Lincoln defined democracy rightly as “The government of the people, by the people, for the people”. It has nothing to do with demagogy, which is the conduction of a few to the many by manipulating them through political ideology.
Demagogy is then the application of political ideology to move the masses. It uses emotions, “reactive buttons”, sentiments, poetry, propaganda, in two words, a political ideology.
Democracy is the general application of political philosophy, and it has been such since its institution by Thucydides and Pericles, “Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.”
When we contrast both concepts, we can understand that all of those who have redefined democracy as demagogy are using ideological arguments, not philosophical research in politics.
Why?
Because they want not to have a real democracy, which would mean, the real decision of people about their own fate and destination, being a democracy, as Tocqueville put it, “a government of liberty regulated by law”. See, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/815/815.txt
Only a true political philosophy based on reason and analysis would be able to break up its parts and see the tremendous contradictions and absurdities, which plague our political ideologies.
We can conclude that a political truth is a truth, but a politically ideological truth is a lie.
Political ideologies are weapons used to manipulate the masses for the benefit of a tyrant or several. Eventually, they destroy societies and produce deserts.
