You are here, blinded, patronized, constrained, and contorted in the land of inverted totalitarianism. And it is almost invisible, because they give us bread and circuses to keep us fat and happy.  Robert Malone explains:

Inverted totalitarianism in the United States evolved from the subtle but seismic shift in which corporate and economic powers learned to exert significant control over governance and societal functions through the corruption of both the political arms of government and the administrative state while maintaining the facade of democratic processes.

Inverted totalitarianism operates through the integration of economic with political power to control the levers of government. This system doesn’t require a dictator or a single-party state. It thrives on the undo influence of corporations, financial institutions, the censorship-industrial complex, and the military-industrial complex while maintaining the facade of a democratic process. Corporations and wealthy elites influence policy through lobbying, campaign finance, and the revolving doors between business and government. This all works to ensure policies that favor corporate economic interests over public interest. The apathetic public is placated into compliance through consumerism, media control, censorship, propaganda, and a political system that offers limited choice within a very controlled spectrum of political thought (“Overton window”). Although elections continue, they are constrained to the range of acceptable candidates and solutions, which are limited to those that corporate-controlled MSM supports and pre-selects through processes that are only partially transparent. The Overton window, which describes the range of allowed public discourse, is actively controlled. The result is that the final candidates in significant elections do not threaten corporatist control of government, and legislative actions are massaged to produce bills favorable to the economic interests that control the State.

This leads to people feeling perpetually powerless, resulting in widespread political disengagement or a sense of political despair. The system allows a culture of limited individualism (within allowed boundaries) and promotes consumerism over collective political action through democratic processes.

Continuous threats linked to infectious disease, terrorism, or economic crises are promoted by the government (psychological bioterrorism and disaster cronyism), and corporate entities acting in tandem with the State actively promote security measures and policies that erode civil liberties, all while maintaining a veneer of democracy.

Digital surveillance, surveillance capitalism, social media, and a globalized economy based on the fusion of corporatism with socialism (ergo, 21st-century Fascism) cooperate to entrench the United States into a managed democracy. Democratic processes have become mere formalities in the face of overwhelming globalist power.

Chris Hedges explained “Inverted Totalitarianism” this way in 2021:

The long campaign against Julian and WikiLeaks is a window into the collapse of the rule of law, the rise of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of inverted totalitarianism, a form of totalitarianism that maintains the fictions of the old capitalist democracy, including its institutions, iconography, patriotic symbols and rhetoric, but internally has surrendered total control to the dictates of global corporations.

Hedges continues:

Now, I know many of us here tonight would like to think of ourselves as radicals, maybe even revolutionaries. But what we are demanding on the political spectrum is in fact conservative, it is the restoration of the rule of law. It is simple and basic. It should not, in a functioning democracy, be incendiary. But living in truth in a despotic system is the supreme act of defiance. This truth terrifies those in power.

See also, “De-Tot,” Decentralized Totalitarianism, discussed here by Jonathan Haidt.

The difference between totalitarian and a dictator is that a dictator tells you what he wants, and he’ll kill you if you don’t do it. But totalitarianism means it gets into the totality of your life. “We’re going to control how you raise your kids what to think of the food you eat, the science, everything, control everything.” That’s very hard to do. It’s only been tried a few times, certainly the Russians, the Chinese. Only a few countries have been tried to control everything of your life. And in a way this thing that we call wokeness has elements that are totalitarian, but there’s no person. There’s no authority. So what you have when everybody can record everybody, when everybody can shame everybody, you get human behavior reacting as if you were in a totalitarian country, but yet there’s no totalitarian.

The end result, the great danger of totalitarianism, is dehumanization. Christopher Hitchens:

“I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy; the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.”

These totalitarianism tactics work powerfully and insidiously through the process of Mass Formation Hypnosis, detailed by Mathias Desmet (and explained by Robert Malone.”