The American industrialist Henry Ford is famous for inventing the Model T Ford, the world’s first affordable mass produced car. The Model T Ford was not Henry Ford’s most astonishing invention. In 1914, Ford shocked the world by announcing that he was raising the rate of pay in his plants to $5 an hour. This more than doubled his workers’ wages. At the same time, Ford decided to limit the number of hours that his workers were allowed to work. Initially, he limited his workers to six eight hour shifts from Monday to Saturday, which he further reduced in 1926 to five eight hour shifts from Monday to Friday. In doing so, Ford invented both the modern conception of the working week and the idea of leisure time.
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Language
Language is more than simply words. It shapes the way we think. In the appendix to 1984, Orwell tells us that Newspeak is a language deliberately designed to limit the range of people’s thoughts and to make certain ideas unthinkable. It can be argued, however, that all languages, like Newspeak, limit the range of ideas that it is possible for people to understand.
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Photo by Sarah Grochala
Ideology
Ideology shapes the way that we think and behave as members of society. An ideology is a set of conscious and unconscious ideas and beliefs that a group of people hold about the way that the world works. These ideas shape their sense of what is right and wrong. They shape their sense of what is normal and abnormal behaviour. They define their ambitions and their goals. At a deeper level, they shape their sense of reality.
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Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
Descartes Demon
In his 1641 book, Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes starts by considering the nature of reality. How do we know, he asks himself, that the world around us actually exists and is not just a projection of our minds?
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