I've not contributed to the ideology discussion, somewhat irresponsibly, given that I sort of touched it off by taking issue with Chuck's primitive denunciation of religion, but I've been super busy in the past week.
I also really don't have much to add to what Carrol says, most of which is excellent. And the piece by Zizek that Doug posted has a good account of the concept of ideology as understood by Lukacs and the Frankfurt School, though I cannot tell if Zizek is agreeing with that conception or disagreeing with it.
For Chuck:
If I have to say it in a vulgarized and popularized way, ideology is the ensemble of concepts that seem to be "common sense" and self-evident which are necessary for mediating an individual's relationship to a social collectivity. Precisely because one is dealing with notions which have the appearance of being "obvious" or like natural laws, mere denunciation is pointless. Critique means examining how a social totality necessitates ideology, how the social totality and ideology mutually condition each other, and how the ideology functions.
You seem to think that religious belief or other ideologies are merely a question of a false perception of reality based upon merely being mistaken, like if one were to look into a fun-house mirror, not knowing it to be a fun-house mirror, and then assume that the reflection is your actual reflection. But ideology is not merely "false belief," nor is it a neurological disorder or a handicap that causes people to perceive social reality in a "wrong way."
The "just the facts" approach does nothing, because even if you have empirical evidence that American foreign policy is brutal and atrocious, that is not sufficient when you are running up against the conception that everything that America does, it does for noble reasons. Either you have the tendency to view "Vietnam" and "Iraq" as mere mistakes, as flawed attempts to do good, or, at the extreme radical-liberal end of the spectrum, paranoid, almost-conspiracist thinking that blames everything on the ill-intentions of a few rotten apples (The Johnson administration, Bush and the neo-cons, particular corporations)
If you want excellent examples of ideology-critique, I would recommend starting with the first volume of Marx's Capital, especially the first few chapters concerning the commodity and the value-form, as well as Lukacs essay "On Reification and Proletarian Consciousness."
And if you can wait patiently, I am planning to eventually translate Ulrich Enderwitz's essay "Was ist Ideologie?" but there are other things I want to translate first.
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