When a theory is transformed into an ideology, it begins to destroy the self and self-knowledge…. No one can tell it anything new. It is annoyed by any detail which does not fit its worldview…. Begun as a way to restore one’s sense of reality, now it attempts to discipline real people, to remake natural beings after its own image.

“The Way of all Ideology,” by Susan Griffin, 1982 (from “The End of the Black American Narrative,” by Charles Johnson, The American Scholar, Summer 2008)