The perfect tyranny would be one in which the subjugated don’t even realize they’re living in a tyranny. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:
Consider the possibility that the Orwellian dystopia you fear is already here and has been in place for many years, you just haven’t noticed because you’re still allowed to watch Netflix or buy a gun or say whatever you want to say within a small impotent online echo chamber.
Consider the possibility that the powerful are already getting everything they want from you, right now, exactly as things are, and that any suspicious action you see them taking isn’t them constructing a cage for you but them tightening the bolts on a cage that was quietly built around you some time ago.
Consider the possibility that while they’ve been training you to watch out for communism and microchips and overt totalitarianism, they’ve been covertly transforming us all into mindless gears in a machine constructed to serve their interests which challenges them in no way, shape or form.
Consider the possibility that tyrants have evolved an understanding that you can exert a lot more control over a population with mass-scale psychological manipulation than you can with overt force, and that they have been developing the science of that mass-scale psychological manipulation for over a century.
Consider the possibility that we’re like a woman who always feared winding up in a physically abusive relationship like the kind depicted on television, and then wound up in a psychologically abusive relationship where her very mind is bent to the will of her abuser in every way.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 