You've never been to most of the places you have opinions about. You've never met the politicians you vote for or against. Almost everything you think you know about the world, you know secondhand.

In this episode, we explore Walter Lippmann's 1922 classic: an argument that democracy has a problem at its core. Citizens are supposed to make informed decisions, but the world is too big and too complex. We don't respond to reality. We respond to the pictures in our heads.

Lippmann wasn't a radical. He was a journalist and establishment figure. That's what makes his skepticism so striking. He believed in democracy, but he also believed most people were voting on fictions.

The question he leaves us with: if we can't know the world directly, who gets to draw the pictures?

Source: "Public Opinion" by Walter Lippmann (1922)

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)