North Korea is at the end state of socialism. Hayek wrote a famous book called "The road to serfdom", and this prison camp, and the way the rest of NK citizens live is the serfdom he's talking about.

Once you accept that you're owned by "society", and that everyone is "responsible for the greater good" this is inevitably what you end up with.

You ask if they lack critical thinking or a critical mass. Both of these are true, they've been indoctrinated to believe in this system, except maybe the ones like the writer of this story who were born in a camp and got less indoctrination.

The sad thing is, you can see this very same thing play out repeatedly in history. The way the germans let the nazis take over, even after it was clear they were up to no good. The way there was no revolution to overthrow the soviet state in the USSR.

You see these same mechanisms happening here in america today-- people claiming that "health care is a right" which is essentially saying they have the right to enslave everyone else for their own benefit.

And there's the error- they think "the rich" or "everyone else" is going to be forced to pay for their wellbeing, never realizing that they are calling for their own enslavement.

Pair the idea that you have a "right" to make others pay for healthcare (and other things) with the claim by these same people that you don't have a right to self defense (eg: own guns.) The latter is even in the constituttion.

You'd think this would cause a dissonance in their head, but the party ideology is so strong they never connect the two.

And when americans are being herded into camps, long disarmed, and forced to work "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs".... they will wish they still had guns.

Schools teach people to be compliant little sheep and have done so for over a century, there's a distinct connection between government control over schools and lack of critical thinking in the populace.

Unless things turn around soon, the US will end up in some sort of terrible state. Not likely like North Korea or Nazi germany or the USSR, but we already are suffering from the economic destruction of these kinds of policies (and like NK citizens told to blame the US for their poverty, we're told to blame wall street, germans were told to blame jews, russians were told to blame "hoarders", etc. etc. etc.)