When people talk about totalitarianism, they think of gulags, George Orwell, secret police knocking on the door at night, and coercion, usually under threat of pain or death, to surrender one’s liberty.
But that’s not the only way to think about totalitarianism. When Aldous Huxley published Brave New World in 1932, he imagined a totalitarian dystopia based not on cruelty and pain, but on providing the masses with so much safety, comfort, and pleasure that they contentedly exist as slaves.
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