If you can corrupt language, you can corrupt thought. If you can corrupt thought, you can make people accept anything.

In this episode, we pair Orwell's famous essay on political language with selections from Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not the surveillance state everyone remembers, but the linguistic project beneath it: Newspeak. A language designed to make dissent literally unspeakable.

Orwell's essay is practical. He catalogs the tricks: dying metaphors, pretentious diction, meaningless words. He shows how political writing becomes a defense of the indefensible by making it sound routine.

The novel takes it further. What happens when these aren't just bad habits, but policy? When the goal isn't persuasion but the elimination of the concepts needed to resist?

Source: "Politics and the English Language" (1946) and "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1949) by George Orwell

It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. That sentence captures something true about our moment. Not that people love the current system. But that alternatives feel unthinkable.

In this episode, we explore Mark Fisher's short, sharp diagnosis of our ideological condition. Capitalist realism isn't enthusiasm for capitalism. It's the sense that there's no outside. That this is just how things work.

Fisher traces how this closure operates: through culture, through mental health, through the slow replacement of public goods with private services. The system doesn't need true believers. It just needs people who can't imagine anything else.

Written in 2009, in the aftermath of a financial crisis that changed nothing. The question: what would it take to make alternatives feel real again?

Source: "Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?" by Mark Fisher (2009)

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)