(HYBRID) The Subliminal Ideology of the Capitalist Mind

This presentation challenges the common tendency to treat ideology as a pejorative label reserved for explicit doctrines or political positions. Instead, ideology is examined as a pervasive and often unavoidable feature of human social life—one that operates largely beneath conscious awareness and shapes interpretation, judgment, and moral reasoning in subtle but powerful ways. The presentation reformulates ideology as a cultural and social phenomenon, offering a more empirically grounded account than conventional, belief-centered definitions.

Building on this reformulation, the analysis makes the case for studying capitalism not only as an economic arrangement, but as a pervasive and often subliminal cultural ideology. It introduces original conceptual tools that make visible a cultural process through which market values increasingly displace human values under capitalism’s expansive cultural influence. While it is widely recognized that capitalism affects social and psychological life, this account examines how capitalist ideology spreads through cultural practices, embeds itself within ethical reasoning, and comes to organize moral evaluation around market imperatives. The discussion raises a central question: whether a market-oriented ideological environment can genuinely sustain humane moral frameworks, or whether ethical reasoning must first recognize how capitalist ideology has captured cultural processes in order to reclaim intentionality and reorient moral life around human values and human well-being, rather than relying on the hope that market priorities will incidentally serve them.

Judah Venturi
Judah Venturi is an independent philosopher and writer whose work engages contemporary social and cultural conditions through sustained philosophical analysis. Drawing from philosophy alongside psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, and economic theory, his writing examines ideology, capitalism, and moral reasoning at a fundamental level, seeking to move beneath surface-level explanations and short-term solutions. He is currently developing a book that introduces original concepts for understanding how capitalism operates as a pervasive cultural force shaping values and ethical judgment. In addition to this work, Venturi is actively publishing essays and presenting his ideas through public lectures and interviews, contributing to a growing body of contemporary philosophical discourse.

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