The ideologue begins by selecting a few abstractions in whose low-resolution representations hide large, undifferentiated chunks of the world. Some examples include “the economy,” “the nation,” “the environment,” “the patriarchy,” “the people,” “the rich,” “the poor,” “the oppressed,” and “the oppressors.” The use of single terms implicitly hypersimplifies what are in fact extraordinarily diverse and complex phenomena (that masked complexity is part of the reason that the terms come to carry so much emotional weight).
