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The traditional interpretation of ideology presented in Marx calls it false consciousness. That is, the illusion that class society imposes on alienated subjects turned into commodities. A typical example of Marxist ideology was shown in the Soviet adult cartoon “I'll Give You a Star”. A woman is promised romantic love, but all she really gets is a dirty pot.�
https://www.youtube.com/embed/cu6sFEud6Rk?wmode=opaque
Ideology calls bourgeois marriage a romantic and sublime union, although in reality the talk of eternal love is nothing more than a way to get a free maid at your disposal. The ideology of nationalism (a variant of patriotism) makes people feel solidarity with unfamiliar representatives of their nation, even if the latter are, say, corrupt officials and thieves.
Such an ideology is created as a product of the economic relations of capitalism. For classical Marxism, this means that the destruction of class society will lead to the destruction of false consciousness – people will be freed from illusions, and society will be governed on scientific grounds.
Zizek develops this idea using the ideas of psychoanalysis. From his point of view, ideology is not a veil imposed on the eyes of people by capitalism. Rather, it is a welcome defense against facing a monstrous and traumatic reality. People create an ideology spontaneously and the most pleasant scenario of human thinking is to never go beyond it. Ideology is a form of psychoanalytic repression, which can be compared to how Freud described the displacement of fear and awareness of death from the human mind. We need ideology in order not to think about how things really are. A woman who gets married is happy to be deceived by romantic illusions. The patriotic football fan does not want to think that in reality he will work all his life for those who sit in the VIP box: the fan wants to be happy or sad with the actual owners of his life when he watches the game of “his own”. The soldier is happy to believe that he is dying for something greater than himself, even if the death occurred as a result of the insane order of a drunken colonel. The believer is happy to kiss the hands of the priest, believing that the latter was sent to him by Christ.
Looking at the world without the crutches of ideology leads to despair, says Zizek, in the case when we first soberly assess our own situation, we experience shock. This is a necessary step towards liberation, one that you never want to take – how painful it was for Neo to leave the Matrix. If you want, this can explain, for example, why Lenin's approach to religion did not work, which assumed that it was enough to make people literate, and they would not need to build churches for themselves. Marx already knew that religion is not “opium for the people” as we used to translate illiterate, but the opium of the people (Opium des Menschen), that people themselves need dope and painkillers.
These considerations explain Zizek's interest in mass culture, a planetary fantasy created spontaneously by a global audience and the global entertainment industry that can numb the pain of economic inequality and social injustice.
Keep this in mind when uploading a TV series for the evening.