Talk politics.

We needn't look too far in the sci fi books to find a good dystopia. We might actually already be living in one. In 1931, nearly a century ago, Brave New World was published by one Aldous Huxley. A story of a hypothetical future of a homogeneous, complacent, docile consumerist society whose members constantly consume new stuff and then throw it away, the populace regularly dopes itself with antidepressants to be happy, they are being told that having society split into castes and classes is perfectly normal, and everyone is constantly being occupied in all sorts of meaningless forms of labour so they don't have enough spare time to think and ask questions.

Sure, I'm not the first one to ask the question if we don't already live in that brave new world, or at least in something that strikingly resembles it. The writer himself published an essay about 3 decades after that book, commenting that the real world was pacing toward his dystopia more quickly than he had ever expected. He believed one of the main reasons was overpopulation, and the resulting methods of population control. He ended his essay with some hints about how the democracies of the day could avoid devolving into totalitarian societies.

The regimes of the future, he argued, will be ones where the dictators rule over "free slaves" who genuinely love their slavery.

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