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> Authorities need people to mostly not react to intolerable things that are happening, and it's best if you do it from placating people with drugs/toys/pacifiers rather than the whip […]

Some modern autocracies don't go after enemies but more protect friends:

> The transition [in Hungary] has been nonviolent, often not even very dramatic. Opponents of the regime are not murdered or imprisoned, although many are harassed with building inspections and tax audits. […] The courts are packed, and forgiving of the regime’s allies. Friends of the government win state contracts at high prices and borrow on easy terms from the central bank. Those on the inside grow rich by favoritism; those on the outside suffer from the general deterioration of the economy. As one shrewd observer told me on a recent visit, “The benefit of controlling a modern state is less the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to protect the guilty.”

* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-...

* https://archive.fo/ZIzCm

I've always thought the achilles heel of Oceania's government was the economy. Pretty much the one thing they couldn't really place into their 'subjective reality' philosophical framework.

The way information passed through the Outer Party technicians was extremely compartmentalized. It was a command economy, did anyone actually know how things were going? The statistics were basically all lies. Eventually the gin and cigarettes would stop flowing.

Related, there are stories of the USSR turning its own spy satellites on itself to estimate correct crop yields because of the culture of lying and exaggeration internally. Basically nobody at the top really knew what was going on, because everyone below them constantly lied to avoid getting in trouble.

I am not sure about all this: they did have a very competent secret service after all.

So the director of the agrar kolchose might lie and so on, but why should the secret informants who are installed in that company, lie about it?

So I am pretty sure, the information was avaiable. It was probably a matter of not wanting to believe the information as that would mean, the glorious sovjet union was maybe not so glorious after all - and thinking that, would make you a traitor. So lets just continue to wave and smile.

This is pretty historically documented, and kind of something that still exists as a holdover in ex-Soviet countries. The lying became so pervasive that it was impossible to tell what the actual output of industry was

The spies lied too and, perhaps worse, the analysis back at the Center was motivated by politics and the usual careerism. The Mitrokhin archives provide an excellent look at how the played out in foreign intelligence, domestic spying was fairly similar.

When everyone lies the only thing spies can collect is lies.

The spies were only used for repression, not for productive endeavours

Presumably the sort of people who can task spy satellites are the secret service.

The failure mode for BNW is when the gravy train runs out and the authorities can no longer afford to keep the public pacified. The much older concept than Huxley's story that Huxley's story is drawing from is "bread and circuses."

That's one of the reason that mullification through the carrot works so well in the United States... It's a very wealthy nation with vast reserves of resources to draw upon to keep people happy.

Sure, but part of how it keeps itself alive is it recruits all these mullified people to work for it, and throwing off some reward to them. This can sustain itself for a long while, as it seems to be doing.

Perhaps the thing that happens is people see it's all BS and just decide they don't need all the toys, and once they don't need the toys, they don't need to work either. Plus they'll get more critical of the system.

The toys are one dimension of perceived and artificially created desires for the hoi polloi.

Please take into account that most of us humans are bound by various obligations. Be it the financial type, i.e. paying off your house for 30+ years or, even more captivating, creating substitutes for natural needs. Compare with the fact that most of us live isolated, especially in these times, without real world communication beyond chats, mail, telephone and, well, Hacker News. The lack of face to face opportunities to speak and do nonverbal communication is one of the causes for rising psychological diseases, drug abuse and antisocial behaviours in the last decade.

Our post Neolithic Revolution society is based on the concept of the ruler and the ruled. Why? Because having power is also a desire which may be the most destructive one for humanity in general.

We may be living on a punishment planet or simulation.

Interesting that in a discussion of totalitarian regimes you would bring up the the "we are only wealthy because we steal wealth from the ground" thing. This whole idea was actually invented by Lenin in the 1920s to justify his totalitarian regime. There is no connection between it and reality, it was just propaganda to explain why Capitalism was still working and had not collapsed like Marx had predicted.

"Resources" exist in people's minds, not in the ground. Rocks and toxic sludge have no intrinsic value.

I think you'll need to clarify your meaning... I didn't mention the ground. I mostly mean that the United States has multiple industries dedicated to figuring out what makes people happy (or at least keeps their joy buttons pushed) and arranges the whole chain of operations to push them and to convince people to do work to make sure they get pushed.

That wealth takes the form of things in the ground, but also influence and the capacity to satisfy the desires of other countries and the people in them. Some of that is powered by processes that use raw materials that are non-renewable and dragged from the ground, but in the United States a lot of it is based on a hugely robust import export economy... Most of the things that push the joy buttons come from China.

Oh sorry I miss understood what you meant by "resources"

> Elements of both exist in the modern world

You could describe the dystopian part of our condition as a blend of various dystopian tropes: https://i.imgur.com/kDo2NNr.jpg

Which of these is most dominant depends on where you live.

> ...though I suspect there is some failure mode we have yet to see. Maybe there's a line of thought where people just get sick of every damn thing being massaged to death by PR people, and they do something about it.

Yes please! A Brontitallian Revolution!

All we need is a mass vision of Arthur Dent Throwing The Nutrimatic Cup.