Engineering of Consent 2.0: Epistemic Control, Cultural Hegemony, and the Instrumental Function of Gender Activism in the Global Neoliberal Order

Abstract

Josue Bernardo Casella Moreira

This paper analyzes the structural convergence between information control mechanisms developed by global economic- political power centers and the accelerated institutional normalization of transgender activism as an instrument of social engineering. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that integrates Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model, Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony, Marcuse's critique of one-dimensional man, the Overton Window theory Lehman, and Asch's social conformity experiments, this paper argues that gender activism—particularly institutionalized transgenderism—has functioned as a privileged epistemological laboratory for a broader process: the systematic weakening of the population's capacity to exercise autonomous critical judgment about directly observable reality. The paper empirically documents the massive corporate and philanthropic funding of said activism, amounting to over $209 million in annual donations (Funders for LGBTQ Issues), and contends that the co-optation of liberation movements by transnational capital constitutes an updated form of repressive desublimation. The implications of this analysis extend to the understanding of apparently unrelated phenomena: the legitimation of wars, social tolerance toward the concentration of wealth, and the erosion of national juridical sovereignty.

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