Axiological Asymmetry and Epistemic Blindness

This working paper develops a structural framework for analyzing modern ideological formations through the interaction of axiological asymmetry and epistemic blindness. Rather than explaining ideological distortions in terms of misinformation, individual error, or deliberate manipulation, the paper argues that many contemporary ideological systems reproduce harm precisely through their internal coherence and moral self-consistency. The analysis advances a non-intentional, non-normative perspective. Ideological inversion is treated not as a product of ignorance or deception, but as the outcome of structural conditions of valuation and perception: unequal moral weighting of comparable experiences and systematic limits on what can be recognized as relevant knowledge within a given interpretive order. When these conditions reinforce one another, material, symbolic, or institutional harm can be reinterpreted as moral progress, ethical necessity, or functional collateral. The paper is a condensed theoretical extraction from Der rote Faden und die Leitmotive moderner Inversionen (2025), in which the genealogical continuity underlying modern ideological inversions is developed in full. Central to this continuity is the concept of the roter Faden—understood not as a metaphor or normative ideal, but as an analytical instrument for identifying structural coherence where it operates implicitly, and blind spots where moral certainty prevails. As a heuristic illustration, the paper examines masculinity not as an identity category or object of political advocacy, but as an epistemic field in which asymmetrical moral valuations and limits of recognition become particularly visible. This example serves to clarify a general structural mechanism without delimiting its broader applicability. The paper explicitly distances itself from polemics, activism, and identity politics. Its aim is neither moral mobilization nor the legitimation of positions, but the reconstruction of interpretive structures: how they emerge, why they appear plausible, and how they are capable—often under explicitly moral self-descriptions—of reproducing durable forms of harm. The contribution is therefore diagnostic rather than prescriptive, and analytical rather than normative.