Excellent article on X by a Polish philosopher, Krzysztof Szczawinski,@Kristof_Poland
In fifty years, history books will say Elon Musk won a war almost nobody knew we were losing. (maybe except for a few guys in Poland)
It began a hundred years ago, in an Italian prison cell. In 1926 Mussolini jailed a 35-year-old Sardinian intellectual. The prosecutor reportedly said: “We must stop this brain from working for twenty years.” His name was Antonio Gramsci. The brain never stopped.
His question: why did the communist revolution win in Russia and fail everywhere in the West? His answer: in the West, power doesn’t rest only on the police and the army. It rests on culture – on what people find normal and obvious. So don’t storm the palace first. Take the schools, the universities, the newspapers, the theaters, the publishers, the courts. When the culture turns, politics follows. Forty years later, Rudi Dutschke gave it a name: the long march through the institutions.
It explains a puzzle we lived with for decades: why almost every actor, singer, journalist and teacher seems to think the same way – even in countries that keep voting the other way. We were told that educated people are simply on the left. The real answer is simpler.
Whoever controls the grant, the job, the review, the prize and the invitation to the studio controls what becomes “culture.” That is one half of the machine.
The other half is exclusion. The one who doesn’t fit doesn’t get the grant, the job, the review, the prize or the invitation. And if he breaks through anyway, he is cancelled.
Money builds the chorus. Exclusion removes the dissenting voices. What remains looks like consensus. It is casting.
The same machine ran on a global scale – through NGOs, “independent” media and “civil society” programs, much of it paid for with Western money.
