The Savage shook his head. "It all seems to me quite horrible."

"Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."

— Aldous Huxley

Like most radical organizations, the hegemony represents an organized system of control, a matrix of domination, a set of relations in the social fabric of the human sphere designed to mediate power between individuals and among colleagues and across cultures. But it is also the case that the hegemony is driven by fear, which as a primal urge arises in response to our darkest concerns, that of our self-preservation and our self-loathing, during those moments when the fealty of our peers is put into question by their desires, and our own comportment as rational beings becomes compromised.

Nothing exemplifies a system of control more accurately than a television broadcast. You are presented with a set of images and you are expected to accept it passively. The effect of each image on your psyche is meticulously predetermined, its suitability for the demographic to which you belong measured and quantified, its propagandist objectives already in force in the moment of your perception. There is no act of interpretation; there is no argumentation or reflection. Like your witty friend of limited intelligence, the image charms you only in the seconds of its debut. For a time you are happy and dazed and you think you are worldly.

Then nothing of substance remains.