Force is expensive. You need soldiers, police, surveillance. But what if you could rule by making your worldview feel like common sense? What if the oppressed would police themselves?

In this episode, we explore Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, written in a fascist prison in the 1930s, smuggled out in fragments. Gramsci asked why revolution hadn't come to the West as Marx predicted. His answer: capitalism doesn't just control the economy. It colonizes culture, education, religion. It makes its values feel universal.

The ruling class doesn't need to win every argument. It just needs to set the terms of what counts as reasonable.

Gramsci wrote in code to evade censors. We're still decoding the implications.

Source: "Selections from the Prison Notebooks" by Antonio Gramsci (1929-1935)

Why do people vote against their own interests? Why do workers defend the system that keeps them poor?

In this episode, we explore Robert Tressell's 1914 novel: a story about house painters in Edwardian England who ridicule the one colleague among them who suggests they're being exploited. They call themselves philanthropists because they give the fruits of their labour to their employers willingly, even gratefully.

It's fiction, but it's also diagnosis. Tressell wasn't interested in villains. He was interested in how ordinary people come to believe that poverty is natural, that the rich deserve their wealth, and that anyone who questions this is a troublemaker.

Over a century old, and it still reads like this morning's news.

Source: "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists" by Robert Tressell (1914)

Welcome back to season one, Manufacturing Reality.

What if the playbook for manufacturing public opinion wasn't hidden? What if someone just wrote it down, openly, and called it a public service?

In this episode, we explore Edward Bernays' Propaganda: not as critique, but as manual. Bernays, Freud's nephew, essentially invented public relations. He didn't think manipulating mass opinion was shameful. He thought it was necessary. Democracy was too important to leave to the people.

The book reads like a confession. How to create the illusion of grassroots movements. How to make people want what you're selling before they know they want it. How to govern through desire rather than force.

Nearly a century later, his techniques aren't outdated. They're just ambient.

Source: "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays (1928)

Welcome back to season one, Manufacturing Reality.

You live in a society with a free press. No government censor reviews the news before it airs. Journalists aren't thrown in prison for criticism. So how could the media possibly be controlled?

In this episode, we explore Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's propaganda model — an argument that free market media can produce conformity more effectively than any state censor. Not through direct control, but through the structural pressures of ownership, advertising, and access.

The news doesn't lie to you. It just consistently frames the world in ways that serve power. Not because of conspiracy, but because the system selects for it.

The question isn't whether journalists are honest. The question is what stories can survive the journey from event to audience.

Source: "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988)

Welcome to season one of Unmarked Exits: Manufacturing Reality. We're exploring how belief and consent are produced — often without us noticing.

Why do most people, most of the time, accept the way things are? Not because they're forced to. Not because they've been convinced by arguments. But because the world just seems to make sense the way it is.

In this episode, we explore Louis Althusser's argument that ideology isn't a set of ideas you choose to believe. It's a structure that produces you as a subject. Schools, churches, families, media — these aren't neutral institutions. They're machines that generate people who fit.

The disturbing part isn't that we're being manipulated. It's that the process works precisely because it doesn't feel like manipulation at all. You're not following orders. You're just being yourself.

But what if "yourself" was always the point?

Source: "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" by Louis Althusser (1970)