We're meddlesome
Somebody
once wrote that ideologies can be divided in two groups. First there
are those that say that people are essentially OK the way they are now
and they don't need to change. Then there are those that say that
people are bad the way they currently are and therefore must change. I
wouldn't go as far as to claim that the first group's ideologies always
win, but obviously they do have a pretty huge advantage to start with.
From this and a couple of other ideas, I recently realized that there should be a word that means an ideology that presumes that it can and gets to override, by threat of force if necessary, the mental judgments of people about how much some other people are worth to them, and make them change their behaviour accordingly as if these had been their real preferences all along.
For example, if all rapists could be said to share a common ideology, this word would clearly apply to it, since a rapist believes that he gets to dictate how attractive he is to his victim, who he then forces to engage in physical acts that one normally only engages in with those that they really do find very attractive. As a second example, the fat acceptance movement obviously believes that the morbidly obese should get to dictate their worth to other people, who must then behave the same way towards the morbidly obese people as they would behave towards the slender people.
I am not aware of such a word in English, so if anybody knows a word whose meaning is at least roughly as described above, please inform me in the comments. This word would be useful in classifying various social and political ideologies among other axes than just the classic left/right division. (One possible word that I could think of would be "Riverian", in the sense of the often-repeated quote by that character in the movie "Serenity", but it's not really what I'm looking for here, as the said quote is still a bit too general in scope.)
From this and a couple of other ideas, I recently realized that there should be a word that means an ideology that presumes that it can and gets to override, by threat of force if necessary, the mental judgments of people about how much some other people are worth to them, and make them change their behaviour accordingly as if these had been their real preferences all along.
For example, if all rapists could be said to share a common ideology, this word would clearly apply to it, since a rapist believes that he gets to dictate how attractive he is to his victim, who he then forces to engage in physical acts that one normally only engages in with those that they really do find very attractive. As a second example, the fat acceptance movement obviously believes that the morbidly obese should get to dictate their worth to other people, who must then behave the same way towards the morbidly obese people as they would behave towards the slender people.
I am not aware of such a word in English, so if anybody knows a word whose meaning is at least roughly as described above, please inform me in the comments. This word would be useful in classifying various social and political ideologies among other axes than just the classic left/right division. (One possible word that I could think of would be "Riverian", in the sense of the often-repeated quote by that character in the movie "Serenity", but it's not really what I'm looking for here, as the said quote is still a bit too general in scope.)
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