Wisdom from Hannah Arendt here.
Total domination runs on two engines
Terror - isolates people, preventing them from organising together
Ideology - a ubiquitous explanation that is unfalsifiable.
The ideal subject for the regime is not a fanatic, but a person who can no longer discern between fact and fiction, and true and false. They only trust what they are told, not what they see. It’s not that they believe the lie, it’s that are too exhausted to form another belief.
This was said before the exhausting technology of social media was around, before the insistence that we a must have the right opinion on everything, on things like climate science and immunology, that most of us couldn’t possibly have expertise in. To avoid isolation we have to carry the right opinion or stay silent, so we select the opinion of the authorised experts, because we are too exhausted to use our own resources and too frightened to be isolated from society and the market. Even when our experts say ridiculous things, like human sex categories are made up of declarations and fabrics, people fall in because of the energy and the cost to resist.