I guess the kind of immersion he's talking about doesn't give me much confidence. If you imagine party propaganda is like the most peripheral part of the entire

I guess the kind of immersion he's talking about doesn't give me much confidence. If you imagine party propaganda is like the most peripheral part of the entire discourse, and there's this gigantic machinery of ideas that makes the propaganda make sense, it's a bit hopeless just reading this kind of peripheral material with a skeptical eye - because skepticism itself stems from the ability to distinguish common sense from illusion, so if you don't have the right common sense, a lot of the time you'll think someobody is talking nonsense or being cynical when they're not, and vice versa. "he must crack the code of the Communist political jargon and translate into ordinary speech this secret language full of symbols, riddles, cryptograms, hints, traps, dark allusions, and red herrings." This, for instance, seems a bad way to understand ideology. If you see an ideology as just a jargon, ultimately translatable to 'ordinary speech', then you're never going to get to grips with ideology that's fundamentally different to your own. If you're a hegelian, for instance, your view of the world is fundamentally different to that of an empricist. You can't just call that jargon and translate it to ordinary speech. Ideas don't work like that.