Why do I defend a system that exhausts me?
Antonio Gramsci
Because the most durable kind of power does not feel like power. It feels like realism.
Gramsci's question was why revolutions kept not happening in places where the material conditions said they should. His answer was : a ruling arrangement holds not mainly by force but by making its own view of the world into ordinary — the things everyone knows, that nobody argues for, that appear to be simply how things are.
You can hear it in your own defences. That people need pressure to perform. That someone has to do the unpleasant work. That the alternative is worse. Each may be true. What Gramsci wants you to notice is that you did not arrive at any of them by thinking; they came with the furniture, and their authority comes precisely from not looking like positions.
This is why exhausted people so often produce sophisticated arguments for their own exhaustion. The is not something imposed on you against your judgment — it has become your judgment, which is what makes it work.
His conclusion is less bleak than it sounds. If consent is manufactured it can be manufactured differently, and that happens in schools, newspapers and ordinary conversation rather than at barricades. The fight is over what counts as obvious.