You are not free, but you will embrace your slavery as if it were freedom

The philosopher Slavoj Zizek once compared a parent saying to a child, "I don't care what you want, you are going to visit Granny", with them saying, "You don't have to see Granny, but she is lonely, sad and really wants to see you".

Today parents are often told that they should use the later technique rather than the former one (one can perceive much about a cultures ideology by looking at how they are taught to address children). Traditionally a child would be told to get in the car whether they liked it or not, but today, parents are counseled to reason with their children and convince them to accept what they are being told.

For most "enlightened" parents today the second approach would seem preferable to the first. Yet perhaps the second approach is actually more oppressive to the child. Let us rewrite the two statements as follows,

1. You may not subjectively (internally) want to go to see Granny but you are objectively (actually) going to do it

2. You should not only objectively (actually) go and see Granny, but you should subjectively (internally) want to

In other words the former statement forces the child to go and see Granny while allowing them to internally protest the event. They may have to go, but they don't have to like it. In contrast the later not only forces them to go (after all the parents will just increase the level of guilt until they do, and if that doesn't work they will resort to the first technique) but demands that they feel it as something they want to do. Here the parents seek to take away, not only their ability to objectively rebel, but also their ability to internally rebel against what they are powerless to prevent.

Here we glimpse how ideology functions. It not only causes us to materially engage in certain practices that may hurt us, but demands that we accept those practices as true, good, and natural. The basic logic of ideology is – you are not free, but you will embrace your slavery as if it were freedom.

Is this not how we should understand the event that happened during the Cold War when journalists from the US and USSR swopped places for a time in a cultural exchange program? In America the journalists from the USSR were shown around some of the largest media outlets in the US and got to chat with many of the people responsible for writing and disseminating the news.

It is said that the journalists from the USSR looked very confused by much of what they saw and, at the end of their exchange, were asked why they seemed so baffled.

"Well", said one of the journalists, "back home we uphold the ruling ideology because, if we don't, our lives, and the lives of those we love, will be put at risk. But here you uphold the ruling ideology, not because you have to in order to survive, but because you genuinely seem to believe it".