The anxiety white men feel about a Huxleyan "pleasant dystopia" not only feeds into their contempt for liberal society but assuredly helps them ignore the Orwellian brutality inflected by the state on literally everyone else.

I raised the same complaint Huxley did about "1984," that such a totalitarian state is inherently unstable. And it would be, applied universally. But it's not even in the book, as demonstrated by the relative luxury and freedom of the party leaders. And it NEVER is in real life.

Orwell exaggerates the situation, which undermines his argument somewhat, but totalitarian states can be meta-stable for long periods of time as long as the worst violence and oppression are directed at some Other whom the rest of society has been conditioned to hate.

I find people tend to focus on Oceania's ever-shifting wartime "enemies" ("we have always been at war with...") over the antisemitic hatred and conspiracy theories the party directs at Emmanuel Goldstein, the perpetual and possibly fictitious target of the Two Minutes Hate.

Orwell somewhat predicted Huxley's complaint that there are easier ways to control people than brutality, and the US provides an apt example: white conservatives ceaselessly advocate for a party and policies that make their lives worse -- as long as someone else suffers more.

Winston Smith is targeted because he acts against the regime. The vast majority of his fellow Proles do not.

Most white Americans shrugged off family separations and concentration camps and police violence against BLM protestors and blatant corruption by the ruling party.

Orwell's opinions about the power of propaganda, especially when people are hermetically sealed in a bubble of false information, are somewhat borne out by Fox News, Facebook, and QAnon, too, which promulgate fear and hatred of the Other and their liberal enemies.

Orwell and Huxley's dystopias are both unrealistic, with real regimes operating somewhere in the middle, but to answer Huxley's criticism: it's a lot of work keeping people happy and pacified all the time, too, even with drugs.

Orwell, I think, better appreciates human capriciousness than Huxley does and how much easier it is to control them through a combination of exhaustion -- the poor and desperate rarely fight back -- and redirecting that capriciousness at others. Actual violence is rarely needed.

With the end of the Cold War, however, Huxley became a leftist darling, assisted by Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death." Their arguments are valid but reflect primarily the anxieties of the privileged who never face state violence: relatively affluent cishet white men.

Huxley and Postman have a better grasp of propaganda in a more liberal, quasi-democratic society, but their white male audience frequently takes their concern with triviality and projects it on everyone they dislike or see as social and economic competitors: women and PoC.

Among white leftists, there is a tendency to treat anything that doesn't advance or engage (their) class interests as "bourgeois decadence." "Identity politics" is seen as a distraction and an obstacle to their interests. Media that doesn't portray them heroically get panned.

Media and figures that cater to them, however, are adored no matter how vulgar or bigoted.

So who's really the victim of propaganda here?

Privileged white men who internalized cultural messages about their superiority and entitlement or everyone else they consider "sheeple?"

They're not the ones being disappeared into camps or killed by cops or standing in line for hours to vote.

Hell, a good number of white leftists refuse to acknowledge internment camps exist even in other countries -- or cheer them on for the sake of the ruling hegemony.

The dripping disdain "stop having fun" guys on the white left have toward modern arts, media, and culture is about the fact it no longer centers them exclusively.

Which, getting back to my point, is dressed up as a form of nefarious Huxleyan social control by the elite.

This is borne out especially by their attitude toward women, whose sexual and reproductive freedoms are often seen not only as trivial to the Great Worker Collective but as a direct threat to it, seeing as it merely embodies their own sense of self-importance and entitlement.

You start to sense the politics of many white male leftists are a warped reflection of QAnon that sees conspiracies and manipulation by the "elite" in everything they don't like but is strangely indifferent to actual state violence and oppression because it doesn't affect them.

"1984," with its resemblance to oppressive 20th century socialist states, would probably never enjoy much favor with these white male leftists, many of whom lionize those regimes while sneering at liberalism, capitalism, and modern media and entertainment as Huxleyan propaganda.

That isn't Huxley or Postman's fault, obviously, and I want to reiterate they made good points.

The media *are* used to manipulate us. You need only look at how the US media handles politics.

But honestly, these white leftists are gullible as hell and fall for it all the time.

So, far from "red-pilling" themselves, white men on the left and right merely reiterate white male supremacy because they benefit from it, and they wish to continue, but more so, under whatever "serious" political regime they envision the rest of us are "holding them back" from.

Meanwhile, banal, obviously false propaganda and violent repression and genocide of the Orwellian variety happen every day, here and elsewhere, right under their noses.

They just can't be bothered to see it. In fact, many wish to employ it for their own ends.

I've certainly seen white men on the left who would happily be O'Brien from "1984," living comfortably, drinking the good sherry, and secure in their power, having long since abandoned the pretense of socialist ideals as a mere stepping stone to that power.

And some who wouldn't mind being Commanders in a Gilead style theocracy either.