One might be hard-pressed nowadays to find a serious objection to the idea that even academic social science does not view the world through the lens of its own culture and pre-established historical narratives. This is how the narrative is reproduced and pushed forward in an increasingly apparent coherence. Contradictions are synthesized, rectified (a matter of trimming away the edges) or outright excluded as statistical anomalies or flawed observation (labeled "pseudo-" or "bad-science") if remembered, and buried without ceremony if not, the very (mechanical) function of cultural amnesia.
What is left is taken and granted unquestionable truth value. Not of course, consciously like a medieval theological think-tank in Istanbul working out new editions of religious dogma or a modern (media) advertising firm (Madison Avenue/Hollywood) in the interest of public relations (well, ok – in some cases they're the same), but subliminally rendered beneath awareness as basic assumptions and not even necessary to disclose in initiating logical formulations. Franz Boas said as much in 1911. It's an hypothesis very difficult to disprove. The easily witnessed phenomenon of truth-value colloquially entailed (or operationally defined and established in non-colloquial milieus) within a word itself as a definite sign pointing to a single definite external counterpart (prosaic or Saussurean, tit-for-tat language) means the assumption need not even reside in a particular unconscious to be found agreeable (make "perfect" sense) on first exposure. In extremely coherent systems, the narrative itself generates the assumption, or at least proves it should it ever come up in discourse.
Such a word is "dominant male" or a male with the more intellectually sounding adjective "alpha". The first expresses the top of a hierarchy, the second the initiator of a linear sequence. They are otherwise considered synonyms and almost infinitely interchangeable largely because both establish a natural precedent to political-economic leadership. Alpha is a bit kinder adjective as it may only refer to a particular culture-hero from myth-time "remembered" as an ancestor (the furthest 'back' a cultural narrative can or is willing to go). Such heroes are not always gender-specific as it may only be a metaphoric personification of a group somewhat on analogy to the anthropomorphic claim of a totem animal (clan reference) to the "originating" group or family line. Unfortunately poetry is absent in nearly all varieties of plain-speak and the association with dominance has already been well established after millennia of civil discourse.
It is important to note the word "civil" here because colloquial and academic knowledge of "nature" has largely been accumulated by those self-confined to civil/city fortresses. "Rural", "peasant", "country" are made words for "uninformed", "vulgar", "sub-existence" (euphamised "subsistence"). The rurally situated college town is a miniature enclave of the city whose civil walls can be seen on the map as the boundaries of the campus. Outside the walls is the service industry. Beyond that (the family farm) there be dragons (aka "nasty, brutish and short").
Hierarchical structure is prefigured by the process of narrowing or constricting one's perceptual horizon. The idea that the electronic interweb expands that horizon with a broader band of communicative potential is contradicted by the ranking and linking system built into it, not unlike the citation of "hero-experts" in academic or political discourse gives emotional credence to one's ideas. Even the word "mirror" refers more to internet identity (read "identicality") than that reflective surface hanging in the bathroom. The radically different is rendered to obscurity and is only accessed by word of mouth (oral tradition) or random drawing (divination) or accident (fortune, chance).
Fortunately, within every institution as well as without them, even in the academic institution, an environment which is set up to minimise or transform one's identity, reside learning-disabled, fringe or reactionary elements, albeit a minority but difficult to eradicate even when identified. John Moore might have called them "uncontrollables". A spirit may be broken or body disacredited, but their presence (essence?) is never eliminated. One can only think there are enduring cracks in every system providing niches for bugs and gremlins. Defined as a disorder by one and all, it is impossible to predict its origin along logical lines, including class lines. I give, for example, the prince, Pete Kropotkin, the intellectual who helped bring down consanguineal aristocracy after spending forty days and nights on the tundra and still proceeds to influence the attack on the bourgeois establishment as well as Darwinian (imperial/free-market) truths ensconced within biology and social psychology.
We may be winning the assault on ideological paradigms (they're all beginning to crumble, even long-held revolutionary ones), even if we have yet to attack the state apparatus which is it's temple. Anarcho-sympathizers are still banging on the gates of the Ivory tower to gain access to the "right answers", if only as an attempt to get out of the folk's house in an effort to delay entrance into the job market, which is increasingly "not there" anyway. Students are still striking for lower tuition to facilitate their success in the institution itself. Their old friends back home might suggest following Rimbaud's advice to make the strike permanent, but to little avail because that would suggest work as the only alternative: "it takes money to fund an insurrection". Well, I'm sorry they can't themselves wiggle free of their aristotelean commitments just yet. Many are already saying "It's coming".
– see Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Louis Althuser
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