&gt; Singapore is not 1984 stuff. People are really happy here.<p>In &quot;Nineteen-Eightyfour&quot;, there are very few discontents. Everybody else is thrilled by chocolate rations being increased or foaming at the mouth during the hate sessions. The whole point of impoverishing language and thought after all is to make people unable to even see the condition they&#x27;re in, which comes after they ceased to be able to talk about it.<p>Since totalitarianism is about the extinguishing of humans as humans (beings that act and are unpredictable, instead of mere cogs which react predictably), there is really nothing to write about the core of it, which is basically necrotic tissue. The only remaining thoughts and actions (that deserve those titles) occur outside or at the fringe of it. Which is why the book is about the exception, people who are still persons, and their process of getting broken. Everybody else either got already broken, or was born broken. They don&#x27;t need to be killed because they don&#x27;t live to begin with.<p>This is not directed at you or Singapore, if anything I feel it applies more to the West, but just as a general thought: Just because you feel happy and safe doesn&#x27;t have to mean you don&#x27;t live in a dystopia, it might just mean you&#x27;re not enough of a threat to it to have it uncloak for you, or that you are even are aligned with it&#x27;s pathology, either by chance or by having been groomed. We should judge societies and people by how they treat the vulnerable and innocent, not how they treat us, is what I&#x27;m trying to say. Again, this is a general thought, I don&#x27;t know jack about Singapore.