I am wondering about something which may be of interest to some here. I believe it has a bearing on what some of you may be thinking and how you are reacting to political developments.

To begin, there is this idea that we, as human beings, have a mental ability to perceive, or to create, abstractions. Indeed, there is a perspective which would see human beings, with their language ability, as the animal which is capable of abstraction, of self-abstraction, and of further iterations of abstraction of abstraction, and so on. Now, this does not mean that other animals do not have this ability, but we are going to suppose that what makes humans different from that is that we experience abstraction as something which is different, fundamentally, from what we understand to be concrete experience: a fearful reaction to a certain immanent threat, or the feeling of intense love, or joy, because of a certain event. Indeed, our experience of ourselves, as individuals, to whatever extent we know ourselves, is in some way this expression of the concrete: we know our personal histories, our childhoods, the things that led to our present situation, education, hardship, a lucky break. We are capable of understanding, if we are attentive, the reasons why we made certain decisions in this intimate sphere of our lives, even if these are in hindsight.

I think that we can accept without too much trouble that we are animals who are not only capable of understanding abstraction as something over and against this concrete experience, but rather we must experience it, we have no choice. The mind seeks abstraction, or avoids it. I will use an example: the person who smokes marijuana. It is quite something else, assuming that I tell the truth and that you believe me, for me to say, "Hello, I am Aardvark, and I smoke marijuana." How often or how much or even whether or not I like it is irrelevant. I present myself to you as a smoker of marijuana. You have never met me before, you see me for the first time.

Now, immediately, you will have some reaction to this. Even if you come from another planet - assuming you are a human - and are totally neutral with regard to the consumption of marijuana, you will see me and immediately begin to try to understand this phenomenon. You will not be neutral, it is some information which you will use to understand this phenomenon - me and my marijuana-smoking personality - which you have encountered.

All so. Now, what do you think: is this an experience of something concrete, or something abstract? Is my marijuana smoking really present? Suppose I pull out a neatly rolled joint, light it, and inhale, like I know what I am doing. I think you would agree this is more concrete than me simply telling you that I consume marijuana, right?

I contend that you would be wrong in that agreement. What have I been smoking, you ask? My reason is this: what I have done is only to demonstrate to you what it means to smoke marijuana. Since we agreed at the outset that you believed me when I said it, this can serve at best only to explain what I mean when I say that I smoke marijuana. It is not any more a concrete manifestation of this fact. It is merely an elucidation or an icon of marijuana consumption, and not in fact a more or less concrete understanding of what this means.

I contend further that if this is true, then even if I share the marijuana with you, and you inhale, you will have a personal experience of smoking marijuana, but the phenomenon of smoking marijuana will remain just as abstract. You will have no clearer insight, and despite what those who smoke marijuana might think, I argue you will have now an even foggier insight, into what the circumstances are by which you came to this act of smoking marijuana. It is these circumstances - not your circumstances, but the universal circumstances which make the consumption of marijuana possible - that are for Hegel the concreteness of this marijuana-smoking.

So as you were about to take your second hit of marijuana, I take the marijuana away from you, and start to tell you everything about how this substance became part of civilization. We would have to discuss the origins of marijuana, its cultivation, its history, we would have to understand why we are not smoking it out in public in New York or Boston because of laws, which have their own history, why it is safer that we have white skin where we are for smoking this substance, and so on. Then we would experience through intellect, the concrete aspect of this act of smoking marijuana. Somewhat ironic, but true in the Hegelian sense.

In so doing, you, having smoked some marijuana, and having met me, would be confronted with everything that you did not know about marijuana, but also in the process you would be confronted with all the things you took for granted, the things which you did not realize you knew - what Slavoj Zhizhek calls the unknown known, in reference to Donald Rumsfeld's known unknowns.

Before I hand you back the marijuana and you inhale a second time, I think then it is important here to distinguish between two things. Whether or not this information I have shared without between inhalations means anything to you or not, whether it changes your experience of smoking this marijuana right here and now, is irrelevant. So I tell you that what you were smoking was in fact not marijuana, but something non-toxic and with no verifiable effect on the human body. In other words, it was a smoky placebo. In fact there was no marijuana cigarette at all, I had convinced you that there was one, and that you held it in your hand, and that you inhaled. An elaborate mind trick. But I assure you, that the history which I told you is true.

Then the next day you go and verify what I said, and indeed, you find the same explanations and history and laws mentioned by many other people, with references to primary sources, and so on. You find the differences of opinion about its efficacy, about health risks, and so on, but the real matter is the set of circumstances that led to the possibility of marijuana beings consumed, things that actually happened, if we believe the sources, all rolled up into one, as it were.

Indeed, your experience of the cigarette has changed, because I told you that it was not really marijuana. What HAS NOT changed now is the historical, sociological, political, legal and ethical framework through which you now view the consumption of this substance. THAT has remained after the smoke has cleared, so-to-speak. Even if you gain more information which changes your mind, you now have an intellectual tool, given to you by me - yes, you are most welcome! - that allows you to mediate between the abstract idea of smoking marijuana, and the concrete historical circumstances in which this smoking of marijuana takes place.

And that tool is nothing more or less than a form of ideology.

It is precisely why we are bound, whether we like to admit it or not, to deploy some notions that allow us to mediate between the idea of something and the circumstances surrounding that something. Ideology is the mediation of abstraction. It is as if ideology is a kind of Higgs boson in reverse. I do not like using metaphors from particle physics or quantum mechanics because I am not someone who has an intimate understanding of these things, and it sounds dilettantish. Here, though I think it works. So simply put, the Higgs boson is this particle - and whether it exists or not, I know the are very confident they found it, those clever CERN people, but whether it exists or not is irrelevant to demonstrate my point - this Higgs boson is the thing that gives matter its mass. It is a sort of mediator between all the phenomena which surround a particle of matter and the abstract particle, the particle which we think we know when we name it, like an electron. We think we know concretely what an electron is because we know it exists, and we have zapped ourselves on household current once or twice, or have seen lightening, and so on, but what that is is merely an abstraction. The electron is not only a physical entity, it has a history, a sociology - if you do not believe me, then read the better textbooks on particle physics; the all begin with introductions to the discovery of these objects which they purport to describe. It is this ideology that is the real mediatrix between the abstract idea and the concrete entity. That is the role of ideology - if we accept that we are inescapably bound to live within a historically, sociologically, and politically conditioned world, this complex set of culture and thought which permeates what we think of as "experiences," and I know by now this idea of experience may be suspicious, but we are almost out of spacetime here - then we are forced to admit that there is a tension, and that we resolve it in various ways, especially by ignoring what we think we know, assuming this is correct, getting by with heresay and innuendo, and the occasional narcotic to get us through.

We are faced with the very problem that we believe that through experience we have "understood" something, better than if we only have an "idea" about it. No scientist worth her salt holds such a position: an explanation is not experience, and the explanation is more powerful even than the experience, because it can place the experience into a set of conditions from which the experience must arise, a womb, a matrix, an idea much more interesting than the series of shallow movies by the same name.

Rather, what I contend is, that neither the thing we call concrete is concrete, nor the thought we call idea is idea. We tend to want to short-circuit the two, rather than stand in between and hold them apart, and then get to the real concrete aspect of what we are doing, which is coming to terms with what we think we know and how we think we know it.

So the political implications of this form a triangulatable manifold. It means that, far from making a choice at the ballot box, we are acting as a set of conditions and circumstances. Good politicians know this. Clever politicians know this, and then act as though there is some other reality, that when you experience a "vote" that this is concrete democracy. No, it is quite the opposite. The concrete democracy already happened, when a story was created that gets a certain group to vote in a certain way. That is the action of history. We as voters, even in the voting booth, are abstractions to the extent that we vote "from the gut" without clearly understanding the entire historical process which led to this moment. Again, this is what Hegel would say if he were bothered to sit down and watch me cast my ballot. Hegel had no such opportunities. It happens when we read an article that exposes some fraud or terrible injustice - ah, injustice, that is another huge area of ideology. Not that this ideology is in itself bad, rather it needs to be unpacked, and the luggage is much roomier on the inside than what sits next to the bed. For another time, perhaps.

For the record, not that I have to state this, I do not smoke anything, drink alcohol, take any sort of painkiller or narcotic, or even like to consume caffeine. I am the classic anti-hedonist, obsessed with my health and scared to do anything stronger than make a weak cup of coffee. Another ideology.

Peace and love be with you, reader.