A worldview’s hold on the masses requires continuous organized repetition and intellectual leadership

Evidence

This can be seen if one considers the fortunes of religions and churches. Religion, or a particular church, maintains its community of faithful (within the limits imposed by the necessities of general historical development) in so far as it nourishes its faith permanently and in an organised fashion, indefatigably repeating its apologetics, struggling at all times and always with the same kind of arguments, and maintaining a hierarchy of intellectuals who give to the faith, in appearance at least, the dignity of thought. Whenever the continuity of relations between the Church and the faithful has been violently interrupted, for political reasons, as happened during the French Revolution, the losses suffered by the Church have been incalculable. … Specific necessities can be deduced from this for any cultural movement which aimed to replace common sense and old conceptions of the world in general: … 1. Never to tire of repeating its own arguments (though offering literary variation of form): repetition is the best didactic means for working on the popular mentality. … 2. To work incessantly to raise the intellectual level of evergrowing strata of the populace, in other words, to give a personality to the amorphous mass element. This means working to produce elites of intellectuals of a new type which arise directly out of the masses, but remain in contact with them to become, as it were, the whalebone in the corset. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1222

Categorization

• XREF: This is the mechanism behind Gramsci’s own concept of hegemony — connects forward to how the Islamophobia field understands ‘common sense’ as maintained, not innate.
• DEFINE: Flags the link between organized repetition and organic intellectuals as the core mechanism sustaining any popular ideology.
• SEED: The Church’s French Revolution losses as a case study in what happens when ideological reproduction infrastructure is violently interrupted — could frame an essay on how Islamophobic ‘common sense’ could be structurally disrupted.