Endo-idealism – The Binding Chaos Lexicon

Adherence to the laws of endoreality which attribute all virtue, ownership, victimhood and credit to the endo-ideal and all vice, guilt and punishment to the negative image.

Expanded explanation

Endo-idealism is the operating system rather than any particular group running on it. Two lists move in opposite directions, virtue, ownership, victimhood and credit towards the centre and vice, guilt and punishment towards the edge, and adherence to the laws that make those movements automatic is what the word names. Marsh insists on the genericity. Endo-idealism is a structure that scales, so male endo-idealism, wealth endo-idealism, industrial endo-idealism and corporate endo-idealism are the same machine with different occupants, and understanding one gives you the others. This is why she reads apparently unrelated struggles as instances of a single form. The workers' struggle was against corporate endo-idealism while the women's liberation movement was against male endo-idealism, and the real issue in the first case was not workers' rights but endogroup dominance. The mechanism produces predictable outputs. Under endo-idealism the endo-ideal is authorized to assign guilt, which is why laws and verdicts around the world punish the victims and witnesses of crimes through charges such as lese majeste, libel, false accusation, perversion of justice and violation of secrecy. Power imbalances are built in from the outset in most established hierarchies for the same reason, since a party with an advantage can come out ahead in every subsequent interaction.

In Heather Marsh’s words

Marsh treats the structure as generic and scalable, which lets her read separate struggles as one form with different occupants.

“The real issue at stake was not a struggle for workers' rights but for endogroup dominance”
The Creation of Me, Them and Us

Examples

One machine, many occupants: Male, wealth, industrial and corporate endo-idealism run the same laws with different figures at the centre.
Charges against witnesses: Lese majeste, libel and perversion of justice punish those who accuse, which follows if only the endo-ideal may assign guilt.
Built-in imbalance: Hierarchies establish a power differential at the start because an initial advantage compounds through every interaction afterwards.

How others use it

Ideology critique in the Marxist tradition describes how the interests of a dominant class come to be held as general truths, and Gramsci's hegemony accounts for consent rather than coercion. Intersectionality, following Kimberle Crenshaw, addresses the multiplicity of overlapping systems that Marsh handles with the scalability claim. Legal realism and critical legal studies have documented law operating in the interests of those who make it. Marsh's account is more mechanical than any of these and correspondingly more general. She is not describing how a particular dominant group secures consent but specifying a set of laws about where virtue, ownership, victimhood, guilt and punishment go, which produces the same predictions whichever group is at the centre.