Financialization does, indeed, serve an ideological function, in the expanded sense of the term mapped by Terry Eagleton (2007). Louis Althusser (2014) spoke of ideology as an imaginary relationship to the realities in which we live, a false cohesive worldview that covers over the inherently partial, fractured and contradictory nature of our consciousness. In this sense, ideology is not some passively received, generic, prepackaged simulacrum dispensed from on high and swiftly internalized. Rather, as Eagleton explains, ideology is an active creation whereby individuals and groups are constantly in the process of making sense of their world with the intellectual and cultural resources that they find at hand.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 59