Engineered Reality

Reality is one of the most important battlegrounds of authoritarian power.

Engineered Reality: Propaganda, Mythology, Narrative Control, and Authoritarian Power examines how political movements and regimes shape the stories people use to understand themselves, their enemies, their history, and the state.

Zoë Roberts explores how propaganda works not simply by spreading false information, but by constructing systems of meaning. Through repetition, mythmaking, selective memory, emotional symbolism, enemy creation, and control over institutions of communication, authoritarian actors can transform political narratives into social reality.

The book examines how these narratives are built, reinforced, contested, and eventually embedded in institutions, identities, and everyday political life. It also considers why some messages take hold while others fail, and how propaganda interacts with fear, loyalty, grievance, polarization, and political power.

Authoritarian control does not depend on persuading everyone of everything.

It depends on shaping what feels believable, what feels dangerous, and what people come to accept as normal.

Power does not only govern institutions. It also governs the stories through which people understand the world.