Popular masses adopt new world-views only as heterogeneous and bizarre combinations.

Evidence

But the enquiry has a particular interest in relation to the popular masses, who are slower to change their conceptions, or who never change them in the sense of accepting them in their “pure” form, but always and only as a more or less heterogeneous and bizarre combination. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1215

Categorization

• XREF: This is Gramsci’s concept of common sense as a fragmentary, incoherent sediment — connects directly to how later Islamophobia readings treat popular prejudice as hybrid contradiction rather than pure ideology.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that masses never accept a worldview in its ‘pure’ form but only as a bizarre amalgam is a paradigm-shifting instrument against elite-vs-masses models of ideology — it reframes conversion itself.