Hegemony

Sometimes I feel so out of my league at college. I am again at the bottom of the heap, especially intellectually. Some days I just can't balance out all of the chaos. I have realized that I can't stay up till two and then expect to be able to wake up at five thirty so that I can go to the temple before classes start at eight. It just can't be done. It does make me laugh, though, that only a byu student would write such a sentence. It is interesting to go to a religious college.

The topic of a religious college brings me to another point. I am going to be getting all intellectual for a little bit. In my English class, we are talking about Hegemony (which I had to look up in the dictionary, BTW). My teacher showed us an equation of Hegemony. So, breaking down that sentence, it means that Hegemony is not just this ideology and theory but something that actually is applied in our life.

Hegemony= Belief + Action + Reciprocal Confirmation

This probably makes no sense to anybody. It didn't really to me the first time I saw it. It means that the things that are common sense and basic beliefs for us happen because of that equation. It basically means that if you truly believe something, you act in a way that makes it seem to be true, which is the reciprocal confirmation part. My teacher related it to religion. He said that because we believe in the religion and we act in a way that supports the belief, then we will always get the confirmation that it is true.

This gave all of us in the classroom pause. I mean, is it a good or bad thing that you can sum up the whole belief system of our church in one equation in a college English Literature class?

We also learned about why certain organizations are so effective. I will relate it to the LDS church because that is what I have the most knowledge of. There are three kinds of Hegemony, Dominant, emergent and residual, and each of these are needed for an belief organization to succeed. The LDS church is so effective because it uses all three of the different kinds of Hegemony. We believe in the truth and power of ancient texts, which is the residual part. We believe in receiving current words from current prophets, which is the current hegemony. Lastly, we believe that god still has more that he will reveal later, which is emergent hegemony.

These things make me really think about religion and belief a lot. I mean, it seems like the LDS church just took all of these reasons for belief and incorporated them into church doctrine. Which, as I have said before, I don't know if that is a good thing or not.

My teacher did point out that you do get a confirmation after you believe and act on the gospel of the church which is the Reciprocal Confirmation. But also, something that is true would have to give the same kind of confirmation. You just have to know when to separate the societal confirmation from the truth. Because people one hundred years ago received reciprocal confirmation that women and blacks were inferior, which is obviously not true.

Just some food for thought.

Sorry that that was kind of a dreary post. It is just something very interesting that I learned today. I just had to write those thoughts down.

On a lighter subject, I bought the cutest poster at the poster sale today at the BYU bookstore! It had five girls and said 'girls just want to have fun'. It made me think of my sisters and I. This is what it was. Observe my technical genius as I am able to load this graphic on to my blog!