Ideology is a system of collected beliefs that a person often falls back upon. This is often to justify for or against thoughts and interactions they may have from day to day; some of which may complement or revolt against their affinities at any given time. For the sake of argument, an affinity is a preference held by a person. I just started my last semester in college, and I am taking a basic writing and composition class. The authors I have had to read for this class thus far were all trying to create frameworks for analyzing social phenomena and their properties as part of a framework that is relative to each person's community, affinity or identity, and whether or not any of these has more to gain and is therefore privileged (especially if they gain more by historical summation of instances).
We live in a cyclical existence where there has been a decline in mutually beneficial social relationships that could be headed toward a collapse. However, I think that the pursuit of freedom ultimately leads to recognizing that any authority has a base to which they can and must be held accountable. In this case, having a sense and theory of how we exist, make discourse, and interact with others is beneficial, and so is having an ideology. This individuates the person from their nearest political representative and is more likely to motivate this person influence that representative as well as their other constituents.
I found it rather weak that in Peter McLaren's "Critical Pedagogy," he still admits that people espousing his belief system of values is inevitably striving to become part of the "hegemony" or dominant form of values. I still think that implies an unaccountable position of class or other factor of dominance to exercise arbitrary will over an "inferior" class that has little ability nor motivation to to influence from the base. I do agree with him on examining social relations in a fashion that is intersectional (where different groups of people may benefit or lose out from an idea or ideology at any given moment). Patricia Bizzell has an accurate hypothesis that the teaching of rhetoric is not attempting to “save the world” with politics, but is inherently political- in terms of institutions having internal politics, social cliques, and leadership relative to the sphere they are involved (i.e. larger trade, industry, or discipline in education). However, I think that the development of new rhetorical discourses that are interconnected tend to justify and attempt to do service to division of labor and expertise, both that which exists now and in the future. In this case, it is only emancipatory knowledge in that it may motivate someone to take a career opportunity with a fresh perspective (though this also might do service to capitalist practices, too).
James Berlin wanted to have a more individual-focused analysis of domination and imposition of ideology as well. I do appreciate his criticism of expressionism that can encourage individual social revolt as an end in itself and thus potentially lacking in direction. However, although persons often have a preexisting community that they are born into, ultimately this does not rule out the possibility for individual affinities to change, in effect changing the communities with it. Berlin’s social-epistemic rhetoric seeks to ground the concept of reality in social (observer and discourse community) and material relationships. Social-epistemic rhetoric relates to Bizzell and McLaren in that there is inevitably a social community that an individual is part of that may influence their perception of social phenomena, and that these communities intersect on the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc. But where is the action toward collective and community resilience coming from with this thought? We have plenty of activists going out with petitions and asking for donations, but are these organizations capable of showing transparency and treating these activists as even stakeholders? Will this maximize positive benefits from altruistic intentions? These are questions I set out to ask.