“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms."
- Philip K. Dick

I love scifi. Not so much the modern scifi where they story is about a cool technology and how it shapes society.
I like the older scifi, when the story is about something being radically different about the society, and the cool technology only exists to move the plot along.
The beauty of old scifi is that it can stretch an aspect of your world to such an extreme that it makes you look at the concept in a new light and question the fundamental assumptions that support it. It usually ends up asking the Big Questions like, "What does it mean to be human?" Or "What does it mean to be free?"
However, the thing they don't ask is "Why does this matter?" They make the assumption that a normal, healthy human being would care.

Which brings us to today's pseudo-reality.
George Orwell would be horrified at a United States where:

we tortured some folks, and by not prosecuting it becomes legal by default
we jailed people without due process and continue doing it today
we have an omnipresent surveillance state that even exceeds Orwell's nightmare vision.

“It’s worse,” he said. “Because if you look at CCTV alone, at least Winston [Winston Smith in Orwell’s novel 1984] was able to go out in the countryside and go under a tree and expect there wouldn’t be any screen, as it was called. Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined. So the situation in some cases is far worse already."

But it's not like we're engaged in an endless war against an unspecified enemy in the name of which our basic rights are stripped away. Oh. Wait.

Let's not forget that our current CinC is conducting a global assassination program in which he decides who dies, anywhere in the world, for any reason he chooses, without having to answer to anyone at all. He even starts wars without even bothering to find legal justifications.
It's completely unprecedented in the world since the days of monarchs with absolute power.

Now imagine President Trump with this kind of power, and you will realize just how negligent liberals have been in regards for civil rights and liberty under President Obama.

Yet even with all of these horrifying development happening all around us today, for every Winston Smith resisting the machine, there are thousands of content consumers quite happy with Big Brother.
Sometimes these contented consumers will rationalize the encroaching Big Brother. For instance, they will say that the other political party's Big Brother is worse, so we must defend our Big Brother.
Sometimes they will react with anger that you dare to bring it up. But mostly people will pretend they haven't noticed, they haven't even heard of it, so you must be wrong. Plus, who has time, amirite?
No matter what reaction, very few people today would identify with Winston Smith except in their imaginations.

When Franz Kafka wrote The Trial, he probably never imagined a United States of secret laws, secret courts, secret trials, and secret prisons. Yet, that is exactly what we have in the United States today, long after President Bush left office.
Where is the outrage from liberals? Does it really matter which political party is doing this?

“But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.” “That is true” said the priest “but that is how the guilty speak”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

When Philip K. Dick wrote Minority Report, he probably didn't imagine that the United States would simply substitute "precogs" with flawed computer algorithms, but that is where we are going today.
Yet discussion of this alarming trend is almost entirely absent. Why is that?

“Predictive policing used to be the future, and now it is the present.”
- Police Officer William Bratton

I have two theories.
First of all, there are drugs.

Nearly 70 percent of Americans take at least one prescription drug and more than 50 percent take two, scholars writing in Mayo Clinic Proceedings say. Antibiotics, antidepressants and painkilling opioids are most commonly prescribed, they found. 20 percent of patients are on five or more prescription medications, according to the findings.

It's not a coincidence that the most heavily medicated society on the planet is also oblivious to the evolution of a scary dystopian present. Why worry about things when being worried is a medical condition that can be cured.
Aldus Huxley saw that one coming a mile away.

"What you need is a gramme of soma. All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."
"Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."
"Take it," insisted Henry Foster, "take it. Stability was practically assured." ...
"And do remember that a gramme is better than a damn." They went out, laughing.
- Brave New World

Ray Bradbury was wrong in Fahrenheit 451. You don't need to burn books if people don't care enough to read.

The other theory is much more basic and even easier to understand. Douglas Adams wrote about it, and it involves Lesser Evils.

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
"What?"
- Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy

It's obvious on both a mathematical level and on a logical level, that if you keep electing the Lesser Evil that you are going to eventually wind up in the exact same place that you would go if you had just elected the Greater Evil. You'll just get there slower.
It appears that we are finally arriving at our destination.