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Here is a famous section by Althusser, who defines ideology as Representation of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence. It sounds a bit like fantasy worldbuilding:
(...) we admit that the ideology we are discussing from a critical point of view, examining it as the ethnologist examines the myths of a ‘primitive society’, that these ‘world outlooks’ are largely imaginary, i.e. do not ‘correspond to reality’.
However, while admitting that they do not correspond to reality, i.e. that they constitute an illusion, we admit that they do make allusion to reality, and that they need only be ‘interpreted’ to discover the reality of the world behind their imaginary representation of that world (ideology = illusion/allusion).
...we arrive at the conclusion that in ideology ‘men represent their real conditions of existence to themselves in an imaginary form’.
Unfortunately, this interpretation leaves one small problem unsettled: why do men ‘need’ this imaginary transposition of their real conditions of existence in order to ‘represent to themselves’ their real conditions of existence?
The first answer (that of the eighteenth century) proposes a simple solution: Priests or Despots are responsible. They ‘forged’ the Beautiful Lies (...) that cause is the existence of a small number of cynical men who base their domination and exploitation of the ‘people’ on a falsified representation of the world which they have imagined in order to enslave other minds by dominating their imaginations.
(...)
>be dungeonmaster, welcome to my magical realm
>you are a capitalist oppressor yay
>not as good as vampire sorcery though
