We can for now leave open the question whether this “ideology” is simply a framing narrative (with Ricoeur) or whether it is a sustained act of “false consciousness” (Marx). Obviously the framers and practitioners of it do not tell us. When one moves to prophetic engagement, it becomes clear that these sustained practices of legitimation are indeed acts of false consciousness that had narcoticized its adherents to the realities of life in the world around them. Those who trusted these reassuring claims did not notice and eventually did not care. They did not need to, because their most
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