Power is maintained not only through force. It is also maintained by determining which ideas seem normal, which values we consider desirable, and which limits we believe cannot be questioned. When a society accepts a particular order as something natural and inevitable, it stops seeing it as a historical construction that could be different. Inequality can then become something normal, power something legitimate, and certain social relationships something that simply work this way. Cultural hegemony operates precisely there: it does not need to constantly force you to obey when it succeeds in making you interpret the world through the same frameworks that sustain the system.

That is why any profound transformation begins before political action. It begins by questioning the ideas we take for granted and developing the ability to imagine alternatives. This does not mean that material conditions are irrelevant. On the contrary, material conditions can generate conflict, but conflict does not necessarily produce transformation if people cannot conceive of another possible order. A political revolution requires a revolution in the way we understand reality. Changing institutions without changing the ideas that sustain them can simply produce a new version of the same system. The first territory contested by any form of power is the minds of people.