It's hard to understand the tyranny of a system that relies on propaganda and manipulation as opposed to overt totalitarianism, in the same way it can be harder to recognize a psychologically abusive relationship than a physically abusive one. You grow up learning that if a man puts his hands on a woman she needs to get the hell out of there, but you can live your entire adult life in a relationship where your partner twists your mind into knots to bend you to his will without recognizing what's happening. In exactly the same way, we grow up learning about Evil Dictatorships in other countries where dissent is banned and the government controls the populace with an iron fist, but we can go our entire lives without recognizing that we are ruled by powerful people who use mass-scale psychological manipulation to exert an even greater degree of control over us. The truth is we live in a highly abusive mind-controlled dystopia where people's thoughts, words and actions are largely predetermined by an information system controlled by powerful plutocrats and empire managers, and the genius of it is that it controls us to a greater degree than overt tyranny ever could while at the same time giving us the collective delusion that we are free. We are indoctrinated from childhood by corrupt education systems which construct the mainstream empire-authorized worldview inside our skulls, and that worldview is continually bolstered, steered, and added onto throughout adulthood from every direction we've been trained to get our information from. The news media are controlled by wealthy oligarchs with a vested interest in preserving the political status quo upon which their wealth is premised. Silicon Valley tech plutocrats quickly learn that living the high life is a lot easier for them if they collaborate with US government agencies and help protect the information interests of the US-centralized empire. Wealthy elites control mainstream culture by restricting which people and what ideas are given a platform in the culture-manufacturing centers of New York and Los Angeles. We grow up thinking we are free, but in a very real sense people are less free in our society than they are under a proper dictatorship: under a standard dictatorship people's minds are freer, because people know they are not free. In our society people think, speak, vote, shop, work and behave exactly how the powerful want them to, mindlessly regurgitating political opinions that were inserted into their brains by their rulers and sincerely believing they came up with it themselves. A quote from Chomsky: “Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.” Another quote from Chomsky: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” Another: “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”