Auto-totalitarianism creepeth apace

The 2005 Hayek Lecture | The Road to Serfdom Revisited: "Orwell set up a world of three giant powers with unstable frontiers that he called Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, each rendered immune to conquest by its possession of nuclear weapons, but each needing, for purposes of domestic control, to create the illusion that they were permanently at war with one another. In his notes for the book, Orwell refers to "the system of organized lying on which society is founded" and "the nightmare feeling caused by the disappearance of objectivity."

Thus for Orwell, the danger of totalitarianism arose from the new technologies of manipulation, control, and surveillance and their being pressed into the service of national security. He painted a world in which the structure of the economy and the tastes of the people were adapted to the requirements of power."

But oddly enough the battle ground in the US is precisely the control and direction of the government itself. The protagonist (antagonist) is not government but power itself as defined by the concentration of money and the power to influence most everything.

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