To describe a particular system of belief that gained some ascendancy, we may use the term "ideological regime." An ideological regime is some structure of belief and related social structures and habits that have become popular in a particular place. In a particular country there may exist more than one ideological regime. For example, in the United States there are currently multiple ideological regimes, such as these:
(1) the belief tradition and social structure of Catholicism;
(2) the belief tradition and social structures of Protestantism, taking several different forms;
(3) the belief tradition and social structures of Darwinist materialism;
(4) the belief tradition and social structures of what we may call money-centered consumerist capitalism.
The interesting topic of the sociology of ideological regimes is discussed in my post "The Sociological Dynamics of Ideological Regimes." One of the topics I discussed in that post is how ideological regimes have often attempted to restrict the flow of information, so that people would not be exposed to information conflicting with the dogmas of such regimes.
A prominent example of such restriction occurred during the Middle Ages. In Western Europe, information was largely controlled by the Roman Catholic Church. Since it was before the invention of the printing press, there were few books available to the masses. People in Western Europe got their information about how the world worked (and about history) largely through a priesthood that told a story line consistent with the dogmas of the Catholic Church. After the printing press was invented around 1436, it was almost inevitable that this highly centralized information structure would be weakened. It was now possible for independent writers to write and have printed books that conflicted with the story line of the Catholic Church. In 1517 the Protestant Reformation began, largely fueled by the availability of printed books. Protestants began telling a story line conflicting with the story line that came from Rome. An ideological regime that had overwhelming dominance in Western Europe then had its hegemony weakened and challenged.
There was another great case of information constriction that helped an ideological regime gain a kind of hegemony and dominance. I refer to the information constriction occurring in the fifty-year period between about 1945 and 1995. During these decades there was an extremely large degree of information centralization and knowledge constriction that helped a particular ideological regime flourish: the ideological regime of Darwinist materialism. This was a time prior to the large-scale adoption of the Internet, before it was easy to get information online.
I can give a little sketch of some of the main elements of the kind of information constriction that occurred:
(1) People got information through books, magazines, television programs and college courses, which tended to be very biased towards the dogmas of Darwinist materialism, and which tended to restrict people from learning about things conflicting with such doctrines.
(2) A small "elite" of publishers, producers and professors exerted enormous control over what type of information the average person would be exposed to.
(3) A small number of encyclopedias displaying very heavy ideological bias were used overwhelmingly as information sources. Such encyclopedias used deplorable information constriction techniques and biased information presentation, to indoctrinate the public in the dogmas of a powerful elite, while minimizing mention of innumerable observations that challenged such dogmas.
(4) There was through the first two decades of this time a very high level of submissive conformism that facilitated such information constriction.
(5) In much of the world, there existed a situation in which challenging the dogmas of materialism might leave you dead, imprisoned in a gulag, or without a job.
Let us consider one aspect of this information centralization: the very heavy influence of printed encyclopedias. It is almost impossible to over-emphasize the effect which such printed encyclopedias had. A few encyclopedias dominated, such as the massive one-volume Columbia Encylopedia, the multi-volume Encyclopedia Brittanica, and (in the Soviet Union) the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Since it was not yet possible to efficiently research things online during most of this period, such printed encyclopedias had overwhelming influence. Such encyclopedias were overwhelmingly biased towards indoctrinating people in the dogmas of Darwinist materialism. Instead of offering people an opportunity to research topics conflicting with such dogmas, the encyclopedias of the 1945-1995 era almost invariably made it very hard for people to learn things conflicting with such dogmas.
I can give an example of the ridiculously biased information presentation that was going on. At the link here you can read online the 2224-page one-volume 1950 edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia. What happened if a reader looked up the topic of "extra-sensory perception"? He would find no article on the topic, only a "See PARAPSYCHOLOGY" statement. What happened if a reader looked up the topic of "Parapsychology" in the Columbia Encyclopedia? He would find no article on the topic, only a "See PSYCHICAL RESEARCH" statement. It was as if the Columbia Encyclopedia had been edited to discourage anyone from reading up on ESP, making it hard as possible to find something on that topic. What happened if a reader looked up the topic of "Psychical Research" in the Columbia Encyclopedia? He would find on page 1612 a one-paragraph article that would tell him nothing of substance about ESP or parapsychology or psychical research, merely mentioning some people and groups who did research in this area, without mentioning any particular observations.
The article begins with the highly inaccurate claim that "the use of scientific discipline in the investigation of the paranormal and supernormal phenomena is comparatively modern, having its inception with the foundation (1882) of the Society for Psychical Research." To the contrary, any careful scholar of psychical research would be aware that the use of scientific discipline in the investigation of the paranormal occurred massively in decades before 1882, with highlights such as the 1825-1831 investigation of the French Royal Academy of Medicine, the 1869 investigation of the Dialectical Society of London, and the 1870's investigations of the world-class scientist Sir William Crookes. The rest of the short Columbia Encyclopedia article gives us no substantive information about psychical research, merely mentioning a few books and researchers. So a reader of the 1950 Columbia Encyclopedia was prevented from learning anything about the massive laboratory evidence for ESP which had been accumulated in previous decades by researchers such as Joseph Rhine. If a reader had looked up William Crookes in the Columbia Encyclopedia, he would have learned that Crookes had discovered the element thallium and was the inventor of the Crookes Tube (the technological ancestor of computer monitors and television), but would merely be told that Crookes was "interested in psychical research," rather than being told of the eyewitness reports this eminent scientist made describing observations of human levitations, phantom faces and hands, a musical instrument mysteriously playing by itself, and paranormal materializations.
This is the type of information constriction that occurred during the period from 1945 to 1995. Textbooks during that time were notorious for their failure to include extremely relevant information. If you read a psychology textbook during this period, you would not have been informed of hundreds of extremely important facts and observations you should have been told about. A "nothing spooky allowed" rule was generally followed in the halls of academia. If seemed after the first atomic bomb had been exploded in 1945, millions were treating the scientists rather like gods, forgetting that the ability to create enormous destructive power does not equal insight about topics such as life and mind.
During the first twenty years of this period belief conformity was aided by the general tendency towards conformism in US society. In the USA the 1950's were in particular a period of astonishingly high conformism in which everyone seemed to want to conform to his neighbors in dress and speech. In New York City in the 1950's almost all the men who went to office jobs wore both suits and hats, afraid to defy the prevailing dress customs. By the late 1960's we started to see a substantial rebellion against such conformism, largely led by youthful nonconformists.
In the East communist regimes enforced ideological conformity with dire penalties for thought deviants. Information was centralized through sources such as the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, consisting of 65 volumes published from 1926 to 1947, 100 volumes published between 1950 and 1958, and 30 volumes published between 1969 and 1978. The Soviet Union had suppressed religious expression during the first two decades of its existence. While such suppression was eased during World War II, it sprang up again in the Soviet Union after the war ended, persisting for very much of the time until 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up. If you had tried to challenge the dogmas of atheist materialism around 1975, you would have risked ending up in some gulag work prison, perhaps in Siberia. Similarly, for much of the period between 1950 and 1990, communist China actively practiced religious repression, persecuting those who deviated from Marxist orthodoxy.
By about 1995 there were some hopeful signs. For one thing, the ideological oppression of the Soviet Union had ended, with the Soviet Union ending in late 1991. China maintained a communist regime, but seemed to have little interest in enforcing materialist dogmas. Another very important development was the widespread adoption of the Internet, and Internet search engines, which became powerful and efficient for the average person around 1995. Now anyone could quickly find information on almost any topic. The chance of information constriction was greatly reduced.
We now have a situation in which people can very quickly and easily find information that discredits the dogmas of materialism. But still materialism largely maintains a stranglehold over the minds of so many. There are some factors that help to explain this paradox:
(1) Materialism maintains a gigantic power base in academia, where almost everyone dances to the tune played by professors indoctrinated in materialist belief traditions, or at least speaks as if they were afraid to criticize such figures.
(2) Rather than using the power of the Internet to properly research topics and discover the most relevant observations and facts, people are still kneeling to the authority of the professorial priesthood.
(3) We have an extremely problematic situation in which most people have their viewpoints shaped by a small elite that controls the most widely viewed web sites. Such an elite often shows an unscholarly credulity to the unwarranted claims of an academia elite that often proclaims things in a way that promotes its own interests.
(4) There has arisen a click-bait economy, in which web sites uncritically parrot unwarranted "science news" claims, largely for the sake of increasing page views that result in increased advertising revenue for those hosting the web pages.
(5) The 1945-1990 problem of excessive influence by biased encyclopedias (such as the Columbia Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Brittanica) has now appeared in a new form, with search engines always producing at the top of their results links to an ideologically biased online encyclopedia (wikipedia.org). Whenever you reach a wikipedia page discussing any topic that challenges the dogmas of Darwinist materialism, you will typically find misleading and often factually inaccurate information.
(6) Instead of supplying a broad range of web search results that are most relevant to search queries, Internet search engines and social media sites will often show results designed to parrot whatever dogmas prevail in academia.
Despite all of the problems listed above, we should be hopeful that over the very long run the easy accessibility of information will help give rise to the decline of the materialist worldview, and to a decrease of its deleterious hegemony over our educational system and information sources. When there is some great advance in the accessibility of information, it can take quite a few decades for the effects of that to appear. It was 81 years between the invention of the printing press and the Protestant Revolution that the printing press made possible. After we have had 40 or 50 or 60 years of the average man having easy and instant access to the facts discrediting the dogmas of materialism, the power structure that keeps alive such dogmas may well weaken, and its spiritually poisonous stranglehold on the minds of the masses may well be lessened.
But we should not be over-optimistic about such a topic. We should remember that Darwinist materialism is arguably a religion, a kind of stealth church in which indoctrination sessions are called "classes" rather than "sermons," the stone buildings are called "university facilities" rather than "churches" or "monasteries," and those teaching sacred dogmas are called "professors" rather than "ministers" or "priests." Darwinist materialism qualifies as a religion if you use my definition of a religion, which is "a set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality and life, or a recommended way of living, typically stemming from the teachings of an authority, along with norms, ethics, rituals, roles or social organizations that may arise from such beliefs." Such a definition describes Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Scientology and also Darwinist materialism. Whether or not they call themselves churches, organized religions tend to persist for a very long time, and only slowly decrease in influence.
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