The political class has a choice to make. Promote ideologies and religions or eliminate them?

Eliminating ideology and religion helps the political class to mold a single culture that’s easy for them to manipulate. Promoting ideology and religion will, inevitably, create a small fraction of people who will become fanatics and be willing to commit acts of violence the political class can use to promote their agendas.

If you created an ideology or religion or co-opted an already existing ideology or religion, it’s some kind of law of nature that fanatics will arise. Find out who they are and then manipulate them correctly, and they’ll do all kinds of crazy things like fly airplanes into buildings, commit brutal murders, be the foot-soldiers of violent revolutions, etc., and you can profit from the results!

Promoting ideologies and religions (I&Rs) requires an Us vs Them situation, which requires at least two opposing I&Rs, which is more difficult to control than a monoculture with only one I&R or none at all. Of course, as I’ve said before (somewhere, I’m sure), the road to monoculture is paved with polyculture wars.

The political class has, however, been working toward manipulating people to do crazy things without the use of I&Rs like MK Ultra and whatever-the-hell they were doing in Laurel Canyon and that all worked out pretty well for them. So, once the monoculture is achieved, they’ll still have options.

Maybe no choice needs to be made; promote I&Rs to achieve your short-term goals, steering the culture all along the way toward monoculture.