Mental illnesses, experts, moral taboos, and the Big Brother: How Orwell wrote a documentary called 1984
I'm writing this because there seems to be a great misunderstanding regarding the human society: humans are generally perceived as freedom-loving, with the will to fight the tyrants and a desire to live free - and let others live as they see fit.
However, both the recorded history, and the observed behavior of actual humans, show that most humans do not live up to these perceived standards - easily, willingly and eagerly giving up many of their freedoms and autonomy for a promise of safety and well-being, something you'd expect slaves to do, not free people. The fact that the human society have readily embraced surveillance cameras in public places, mandatory taxation, and have created many privileged government agencies and empowered them to do what an "ordinary" citizen isn't authorized to, is one of the best arguments against the "noble, freedom-loving Humanity".
Heck, even the presence of authorities is proof that humans have serious trouble with freedom - after all, the only use for these authorities is to force others to act on someone else's behalf.
Orwellian nightmare vs. human history
Orwell's 1984 is known as a classic dystopia, where after a post-war crisis, human societies have become authoritarian - and this ended up in a huge prison state where people were put under constant surveillance, oversight, and correction from the "Big Brother" which is, essentially, the personification of a totalitarian state.
Some of the more widely-known elements of that regime, such as "thought police", the Ministry of Truth, the concept of absolute surveillance, or supplanting logic and reason with the State's authority, have now spread into many cultures, and are associated with tyranny and authoritarianism in general. And all are widely known to originate from that Orwellian dystopia novel.
The real-life inquisition, and the concept of heresy, however, pre-date Orwellian novel - and by a long shot. Centuries before Orwell have made up the ministry of truth, the Holy Church was widely perceived as one of the universal arbiters of truth; the concept of "heresy" is nothing else than deviation from the Church's narrative, and it was considered a crime back then - punished by excommunication, exile, or even torture or execution. Islamist societies are known to practice religious "thought-policing" today, and in several countries it is a crime to be an atheist, or have some "unacceptable" views.
As for the "truth", people have a long history of voluntarily choosing and following leaders, including the spiritual ones which guide their minds and thought. These people barely, if ever, think anything through, so they usually closely follow the word of a leader - be it a priest, an "expert" or a "trusted source". Most humans are known to have not an fact-oriented but instead a reputation-oriented way of thinking to determining the truth - that means, instead of analyzing the facts and support data in order to determine the truth, they analyze the so-called reputation grade of a source where the information is coming from. A great example is the heliocentric system as described by Gallileo Galilei; despite him providing superior reasoning and arguments in favor of heliocentrism, he was declared a heretic by the Catholic Church - and was forced to abandon his views. Because the Catholic Church's reputation outweighs his.
Though this is still a far cry from "rejecting the evidence of your eyes and ears", it is at least theoretically possible to reach the level of bullshitting where the humans will no longer believe what they see and what they hear - for example, if they're convinced that the things they see with their eyes are "too complex for them to perceive" and that "they need an expert to decipher what they see". Whether such a measure will ever be considered useful from a human-handler's point, remains up to speculation - however, as far as facts go, humans have lived, and are living, in a world where facts are being entrusted to the "experts" and the people are left with picking the most reputable opinion to follow.
As for the surveillance, even before cameras became a thing, humans were extremely paranoid towards each other, always expecting something bad to come from their neighbor. Not a surprise, given that the humanity is a fairly violent species and that they prefer to fight each other over issues instead of peacefully finding a solution which will significantly satisfy all of the parties. The need to distinguish between the friend and the foe have manifested in tribal identity - a set of rules and guidelines to prove that you're one of "us" and not "them", a primitive solution but perhaps the only one reliably available to the primitive humans. And of course, to ensure that a particular person is following these guidelines, the need for oversight arose. And of course, one of the most secure ways to ensure that your property and your person is safe is establishing 24/7 surveillance around you so you can see anything and everything around you. Sure, it does come with numerous inconveniences, but it's not like most humans can actually make anything better so the stick with this. So to make their community safe, well, they come with widespread surveillance "to protect themselves against bad criminals" or whatever. After all, what could go wrong - or rather, do they really give a shit about this one?
In this fashion, the human societies were naturally gravitating towards an authoritarian surveillance state where the balance between privacy and security shifted heavily towards surveillance, the balance between freedom and oversight shifted extremely towards authority and discipline, and most dissenters are dealt with, swiftly and violently. So an Orwellian totalitarian state is not exactly a fictional dystopia, but rather the result of natural human evolution which have been halted by individualist/libertarian ethics which have emerged not so long ago - predominantly thanks to the previous practices of humans easily leading to abuse of the system thanks to its vulnerability.
In other words, most of the human societies were always an Orwellian nightmare - minus the technological means to conduct mass-scale surveillance and oversight.
Populist and classical-liberal ethics are a result of mismanagement and power abuse, not a natural evolution of society
The primitivity of most of the humans have surely resulted in their populace being largely cattle-like, concerned mostly with animal desires such as food, reproduction, and safe shelter - without any intent to solve this problems themselves and with a large desire to have them all solved by some sorta "caretaker". The other side, however, the "caretakers", is made of humans who're just as primitive and animalistic - resulting in rulers of all sorts acting belligerent and domineering over their subjects, often mistreating them or outright hurting them, often just to satisfy their animalistic desire to dominate.
As a result, even the cattle-like humans started expressing their desire for a change, for a better leader; and sometimes, these better leaders did emerge, with a better offer than the previous one had. One particular country, which have been founded by the descendants of rather-hardy colonists who've sailed across the Atlantic Ocean (enduring numerous hardships as they did) and then had to colonize absolutely uncivilized lands (more hardships) and fight off hostile Indians (now that's a recipe for a hard life), happened to develop a more hardy mentality, which in turn gave rise to appreciation towards freedom, independence, and a disdain for authority. At some point, the King went way too far with his taxes and disarmament and other infringements on colonists' autonomy, so they've seceded and formed one of the freest nations in the world, still hosting a large fraction of hardy and/or freedom-loving persons. The freedoms obtained as a result have greatly empowered strong-minded, capable, intelligent persons, as well as various opportunists and those with latent merit to do what they want, however they want it, letting them prosper as they see fit - no longer shackled by the authorities or religious dogmas. At the same time, empowerment of civilians gave them much greater liberties in handling various threats, resulting in America becoming one of the safest nations in the world, right until the gun control kicked in.
Those residing in other nations started to take notice, and values similar to American ones started appearing, resulting in formation of pro-liberty movements and sometimes even to uprisings. After all, if this is what gives you prosperity and safety - and does it better than your current masters do - then why not? It is after America became rich and prosperous, those movements started gaining influence in various countries - eventually taking hold even in authoritarian, hierarchical and openly repressive shitholes such as Russia, or even China.
It doesn't mean, however, that the humanity have suddenly changed fundamentally, and became a species made of fully-aware, fully-sapient, strong-minded individuals who highly value their own personalities, will, and interests. The masses haven't changed a bit, still being cattle wanting nothing but food, sex, housing, and social care. And when the society became prosperous and strong enough to cater to most of the needs of the populace, (and, by extension, strong enough to reasonably consider even more advanced socio-political forms previously thought to be unviable) various ideas regarding improvement of people's quality of life have emerged.
One of the good examples of such ideas is socialism, a society where everything is managed by the state or another monopoly - from small exchanges and personal affairs, to macro-economics and large socio-political affairs, such as wars, country-wide economic plans, or people's standards of living. Pretty much this is similar to how people were enslaving themselves some time ago in exchange for "guaranteed" food, shelter, and protection; now they want to entrust themselves into the hands of a single Master which is supposed to protect them against "injustice" and provide them whatever they need, or almost whatever they need. Of course, what they need and what they do not is up to that Master to decide.
Of course, it's not like those socialists are fighting for a miserable life as indentured servants while their Masters will dictate them how much they might or might not have - it's just that when this happens, they don't protest too much because they'll still have their lives and some basic substinence if they just shut the hell up and do what the monopoly in charge of their affairs tells them to. After all, this is mostly what they need; long as they have food, they only look any further when the circumstances are extremely loyal for them, so they could actually consider something like a stateless, classless, and moneyless society run by absolutely and totally fair and just machines which will surely re-distribute the goods according to the most fair of all fairnesses. Just don't ask what does that fairness mean precisely and where does it come from, and you won't be vaporized by our totally legit dissent monitoring squads.
Should the humanity be really devoted to personal liberties, or at least respect them enough, ideas such as socialism would never gain large support anywhere. And should humans be really sapient, they'd notice it very soon that their "solution" to deal with power-hungry capitalists which grow and grow until they become a monopoly is skipping the "grow and grow" stages and creating a monopoly faster than it should've emerged naturally.
So it's not like the humans are free and noble, it's more like there was one country which have formed thanks to a quite unusual set of circumstances, and that this country happened to appeal the most to the real wealth creators: the talented, intelligent persons who discover new things, invent new mechanisms, build industries with the goal of mass-producing those things, and create a flourishing economy - while greater freedoms allow for more flexible civil organisation to deal with social issues. These freak accident leads to American lifestyle spreading across the world, and even spawning classical liberalism within the formerly-authoritarian Europe, which then took over the Old Regime and established a new culture.
But when these flourishing liberal regimes make life in society much easier than it was before, and thanks to newly-gained freedom of expression there is no threat of getting arrested/tortured/killed should you express a desire to have even more than you do now, various ideas and thoughts on how to transform the society for an even easier and better life - and since the masses aren't sapient as they never were and never will be, the simplest and most appealing ideas become the most popular. Such as "let's fight monopolist imperialism by creating a monopoly which'll turn into an authoritarian and oppressive empire orders of magnitude faster than it could've possibly happened naturally."
And there we have a so-called "communist Orwellian takeover" which is nothing but human nature manifesting itself. Again.
Heresies became mental illnesses, the word of God became climate change, and the King's authority became "your own safety"...
There are always, though, few opportunists who not only wish to rule the world, but actually envision themselves doing it. And they often have a plan.
And since the emergence of liberal/egalitarian ethics, they couldn't just come out as the "rightful rulers of the land" and order peasants around as they did before. Not with the population that now believes that their freedoms are paramount, without understanding much what does it mean but while still having enough resentment for feudalism.
And many of them aren't too inventive, so they usually just come up with the very same old mechanisms of governing the societies - such as, enthralling the people with some cultist narrative, convincing them that oppressive violence on behalf of the regime is "justice", and training them to be obedient via controlled access to pleasure. Well, not like they need any new mechanism if the old one works just fine - provided that you don't abuse it way too much, of course. And this time, you've got technological advancement on your side. But still, you need to convince the plebs to accept your authority - and since you aren't planning on giving them anything of actual value, you need to come up with some BS narrative. There, the fact the humanity is mostly non-sapient also plays in your favor; all you practically need to do is to come up with a fresh narrative that doesn't have any negative emotional undertones to it and wasn't denounced strongly enough at any significant point of history, and you've got a functioning new religion. Such as the climate change. Or the "basic human rights" (which is more like an obsolete social invention turned into a religion). And then you've got to exploit that religion until it becomes widely enough opposed. Then you come with the new one and the entire process repeats.
And even though you aren't a "rightful ruler of the land" now, you can exert authority and use violence just about as easy as you did before.
All you had to do is change the name of the abuses you were performing on the populace and they would accept everything. Well, most of them will, but then again, there are numerous ways to deal with those who won't.
Well, not quite exactly. There was no organ harvesting or turning people into retards by excising a part of their brain or killing their mental faculties with chemicals or electricity. Not like there weren't any other ways of torturing people or maiming them, though.
But why are the human societies becoming so increasingly atrocious?
Probably you wonder why can't we all just leave each other alone, keep to our own bodies, minds and laws, and enjoy barbecue (or whatever we like) in peace without pushing any sort of crap on each other. After all, the would would be such a great place should we just leave each other be...
...except that nope, it just doesn't work like that. As violent as humans are, they've evolved to see each other as a potential threat - and to lash at each other at the slightest signs of provocation. Such as, you smell wrong. You don't look like any of us. You have wrong tastes in music, movies, videogames, food, politics, well, anything. For a sapient being it rarely really matters, but the semi-sapient humans mostly controlled by animal instincts are another thing.
And even though they have various agreements to not bug each other over differences in views, and violation of those agreements brings bad repercussions, they always look for ways to jab someone who isn't like you and not get punished for that. Not because the different guy is actually a threat, but because, well, it's just their nature.
And among those animals, there are those sapient ones, who look forward to exploiting those animals - and who has some visions as for how would they do this. And usually, those visions are all similar: the use of controlled violence, omnipresent surveillance to know exactly what their underlings are up to, the power gap to ensure their underlings will be nearly unable to defend themselves, and a narrative to ensure they all shall feel fine with that - and even think it's for their good. Conditioning those violent animals to accept controlled violence isn't that hard, especially when they sometimes use this violence to get rid of whoever they dislike - as observed in the USSR during Stalin's reign, as observed in China now, and even in the United States during the CoVID craze when "contact tracing" was pushed, supposedly to combat virus propagation.
After all, if these cameras are to help your tribe fight off the others, why not just surrender a huge part of own volition and cognitive autonomy (not like the animals have much use for that, or even have that) and you'll have one of the best instruments to enforce your tribe's will. All you need to do is be a good boy and listen to whatever th Leader says. And you'll be rewarded. Which is another reason to stand for this kind of society: it doesn't just punish disobedience, but also rewards being a good doggie.
You might believe in human nobility all you want. But then again, there's reality, and it doesn't change just because someone doesn't believe it exists.