We live in a police state. Local, provincial, state, federal, etc. The police operates at every level of government and society. Intelligence agencies have the technology, money and expertise to spy on, capture and interrogate anyone. Politicians have every interest in keeping the economic and political system as they are: working strictly in their own favour.

The media (TV, newspapers, Internet, etc.) functions to ensure that the right politicians will get elected at the time most convenient for the rich and powerful to expand their wealth and power.

The masses live and die like puppets who need only two things to be happy: Walmart and MacDonalds. As long as the masses have cheap junk food and cheap trinkets, they will consume themselves into oblivion, and live a life devoid of any fighting or revolutionary spirit. They will get up every morning, go to their jobs where they are used as wage slaves, return home to be indoctrinated by their TVs, and in their spare time they will go and consume more cheap trinkets and more cheap junk food.

Anyone who refuses to live in the consumer capitalist paradise is an enemy and therefore evil. Religion has taken the place of philosophy, and it has become a self-enforcing ideology in which fear of god is used to ensure the masses remain opiated and unwilling and incapable of changing anything.

This is the police state of 1984. The difference is that as long as the citizens are free to consume, they think they are free to act. As long as the citizens cast a meaningless little vote every 4 years, they think that they have political power and the power of decision and influence over the rich and powerful who rule them.

Once in a while it is necessary to sedate the masses, so a 'bad guy" is found. somebody who did not play by the rules of the system. A Bernie Madoff or a Rupert Murdoch are good examples. Then social discontent is channeled into indignation over some corrupt powerful man. They will bombard the masses with the wrongdoings of the corrupt rich, while pretending to do something about it so that the masses don't see the need to change anything meaningful or structural in the political and economic system.

We don't have Big Brother. We have the capitalist empire, and the all powerful intelligence agencies that control the population and keep it from erupting into revolution.

In the meantime, we all go on enjoying our junk food, we keep buying cheap consumer crap, and we tell ourselves that the half truths sold on TV are the "real news".

We are so lost that we cannot see any way in which anything could ever change. The Bernie Madoffs and Rupert Murdochs will be tried, even jailed. Only to be replaced by others just as bad as them. Menawhile the masses are incapable of changing anything because of their intellectual and ideological paralysis, and their willing submission to consumerism and the comfort of the TV remote control.