As said, I hope “1984” scared you. But not by its darkness or pythonesque violence. Nor even because of its oh-so-effective picture-painting of oppression and the destruction of independent thought in service to the interests and ambitions of the elites who run the show things in Orwell’s Oceania.
No, my hope is that “1984” scared you because you recognize how far modern America has already been dragged into a “1984” alternate universe.
Americans today are subjected to routinized lying and spinning and propaganda and consent-engineering throughout all our dominant institutions of authority. We suffer an endless drumbeat of state-worship, churned-out by every commercial interest beholden to the state for the butter on its bread. Most importantly, we are under constant and heavy pressure to drink the state’s Kool-Aid, embrace its self-serving fictions, and abandon reliance on — or even belief in — our own powers of observation and reason.
Like no others before us, today’s Americans ...
