Vision, Ideology and SUVs

I'd like to add a few things to the discussion of how we look, how it's shaped by our ideologies, and where those ideologies come from that the colonel began in his last post here. His analysis of images is, I believe, spot on. The difference between their denotations and connotations can be thought of in another way: that of fact versus feeling. To a certain extent, an image is a fact - which is to say, it shows what it shows. On a different wavelength, however, are the feelings that these images conjure up for us. These feelings, as the colonel points out, are shaped in large part by our ideologies.

Corresponding to the quote from Marx and Engels, Jean Baudrillard writes in an essay entitled "The Ideological Genesis of Needs," published in The Consumer Society Reader, that "the survival threshold is never determined from below, but from above." This also connects with the colonel's example of Starbucks, SUVs and McMansions - these are only normal for those who can afford them, but have been structured in such a way that they are also "normal" for everyone else.

If our ideologies are decided for us by elites, does the potential for us to change them, to restructure them in such a way that is more based in reality still exist? Can we take control of ideologies, and perhaps make them "for the people, by the people?"

-the ambassador