What's the most brutal authoritarian state in fiction?

[Anonymous No.14131435]

[Anonymous No.14131440]

>>14131435
God's kingdom.

[Anonymous No.14131468]

>>14131435
Oceania is probably the worst. It's not a romanticized totalitarianism, just bleak as fuck.

[Anonymous No.14131608]

>>14131440
edgy

[Anonymous No.14131618]

>>14131440

[Anonymous No.14131621]

>>14131440
Most authoritarian? Correct. Fiction or in any way bad? Nope.

[Anonymous No.14131631]

CITIZEN, PICK UP THAT CAN.

[Anonymous No.14131646]

>>14131631
Nah

[Anonymous No.14131675]

CWCville

[Anonymous No.14131705]

>>14131675

[Anonymous No.14131711]

The Metalocalypse state

[Anonymous No.14131826]

>>14131440
I said in FICTION

[Anonymous No.14131835]

The government's control over its subjects was greatly increased by a new invention which would have been a cause of increased social well- being had it occurred in a more wholesome society. This was the product of advances in physiology and electrical engineering. The mechanism of the human brain was by now fairly well known; and by means of a vast mesh of minute photoelectric cells, inserted by a brilliant surgical technique between the cerebral cortex and the skull, it was possible to record very accurately the ever-changing pattern of activity in the cortical nerve-fibres. Advances in the technique of radio made it easy to transmit this record over great distances, and to decode it automatically in such a way that the thoughts and impulses of the observed person could be accurately 'read' by observers in far-away government offices. The immense knowledge and skill which went to these inventions might have caused untold benefits to mankind; but through the treason of the technologists and the power-lust of the rulers they were combined to form a diabolical instrument of tyranny.

A law was passed by which everyone suspected of harbouring dangerous thoughts was condemned to have his brain made available for constant observation. This involved an operation for the insertion of the photoelectric mesh under his skull and the attachment of the necessary miniature accumulators to his crown by screws driven into the skull itself. If any attempt was made to tamper with the instrument, or if the accumulator was allowed to run down beyond a certain point, the unfortunate individual was automatically subjected to the most excruciating pain, which, if prolonged for more than an hour so so, culminated in permanent insanity. In addition to this transmission- instrument there was a minute radio telephone receiver driven into the mastoid bone. Thus not only were the subject's thoughts and feelings open to inspection at every moment of his life by some remote official but also instructions, threats, or repetitive gramophone propaganda could be inflicted on him morning, noon, and night.

[Anonymous No.14131846]

>>14131835
A law was passed by which everyone suspected of harbouring dangerous thoughts was condemned to have his brain made available for constant observation. This involved an operation for the insertion of the photoelectric mesh under his skull and the attachment of the necessary miniature accumulators to his crown by screws driven into the skull itself. If any attempt was made to tamper with the instrument, or if the accumulator was allowed to run down beyond a certain point, the unfortunate individual was automatically subjected to the most excruciating pain, which, if prolonged for more than an hour so so, culminated in permanent insanity. In addition to this transmission- instrument there was a minute radio telephone receiver driven into the mastoid bone. Thus not only were the subject's thoughts and feelings open to inspection at every moment of his life by some remote official but also instructions, threats, or repetitive gramophone propaganda could be inflicted on him morning, noon, and night.

At first this technique was applied only to those under suspicion, but little by little it was extended to all classes of society, save the oligarchs themselves and their most favoured servants. Immense offices were set up in all the main centres, where hosts of inspectors were constantly at work taking sample readings of the world's two thousand million minds. Every ordinary man, woman, and adolescent knew that at any moment he might be under inspection. At any moment a voice might interrupt his thoughts with some propaganda commentary on them, or with a rough warning or the imposition of a penalty. While he was going to sleep he might be invaded by music and incantations calculated to mould his mind into the temper approved by the government. Those who were brought up from childhood to be accustomed to this treatment accepted it cheerfully. The very young were sometimes even impatient to receive what they foolishly regarded as this certificate of maturity. Under the constant influence of official scrutiny the minds of adolescents became almost perfectly correct. Dangerous thoughts, even of the mildest type, were for them unthinkable. Those who received the treatment as grown men or women suffered prolonged mental agony, and many committed suicide.

The policy of those who controlled this vast system of espionage was simply to ensure that all minds should be orthodox. As time went on, the inquisitors themselves came to be chosen solely from the ranks of those who were products of the system itself. So amazingly correct were these minds that they suffered nothing from the publicity of all their mental processes.

[Anonymous No.14131849]

>>14131846
The strangest aspect of the system was this. Those who controlled it were themselves enslaved to it; they used their power not to emancipate themselves but to support the ruling caste. In the earlier phase of the Chinese world-empire the caste, or rather the non- hereditary class from which the caste later developed, had maintained its position by superior cunning and resolution; but in its later phase, when cunning and resolution had given place to stupidity and self-indulgence, the position of the ruling caste was maintained automatically by the mechanical functioning of the established social system. The rulers had immense privileges and great arbitrary powers. For them the workers piled up luxuries. In accordance with the vagaries of their fickle taste, fashions changed, whole working populations were suddenly worked to death or flung aside into the cold-storage warehouses. When the rulers said 'do this' or 'do that', the world obeyed. But their power lay wholly in the fact that the technicians were hypnotized in their service, hypnotized, not through the cunning and resolution of the rulers themselves, but through the vast momentum of traditional culture. Thus little by little the ruling caste became at once helpless and absolutely secure. In the same manner the slave-owning ants depend wholly on the ministrations of devoted slaves who have all the skill but not the wit to rebel.

The perfection of the system of social control was reached by means of a further triumph of inventive genius. After much laborious experiment a method was devised by which the impulses and desires of the individual could be either stimulated or suppressed by radio. Thus it was possible for the officials in a distant government office to force upon a man an irresistible craving to carry out a prescribed course of action. Like one under hypnotic influence, but with full consciousness of the enormity of his action, he might find himself compelled to betray his friend, to murder his wife, to torture his child or himself, to work himself to death, to fight against impossible odds.

Little by little the whole subject population of the world was fitted with the instruments of volitional control. The government was now practically omnipotent.action. Like one under hypnotic influence, but with full consciousness of the enormity of his action, he might find himself compelled to betray his friend, to murder his wife, to torture his child or himself, to work himself to death, to fight against impossible odds.

[Anonymous No.14132035]

>>14131621
>Fiction
It depends on how you define fiction, and how you define god.

>bad
This also depends on multiple factors. On the low end, where god is conceived as a mere preternatural entity, a mind is capable of redefining valence associations arbitrarily given enough practice. States of being associated with god being recontextualized as undesirable, and states of being associated without god being recontextualized as desirable paints god as bad in the truest sense of the word. God can only be considered as good in this case insofar as one neglects to consider the meaning of good and bad, shirking the preexistence of solipsist valence to "good" and "bad", and the ability to argue the goodness of god becomes a hopeless affair. A soul strange enough is uncompelled by both the persuasion coercion of god. Not in an ontological or dialectical rejection, but through simple concepts that exist outside the familiar system in the first place, and by definition cannot be acted upon.

However, if we take a more subtle and nuanced understanding of god as omnibenevolence, the definition and character of god shift with our recontextualizations. By changing our valence, we perform what is known as arbitrary observation injections, and the very fabric of god itself warps. In this instance you are somewhat correct, but anti-exclusive oxymoronic divinity goes against all traditional conceptions of god, and the intransitive transcendence is usually rejected very hard for the threat that it poses to thousands of years of thinking. The correctness of this can even be falsified, by peeling back the epistemology of god itself. Rather than conceptualize it as a traditional entity, we can instead imagine god as an entity with an undecidable identity, and that which may only be identified by a proxy meta-identity. It's far better, and potentially more accurate to conceive of god as an impermanent bed of chaos, a completed plane that cannot be traversed WITHOUT contradiction, and contradiction that does not falsify the conflicting components. Under this new conception, one simply readjusts the front by shifting the focus of valence to this higher level, and in not redefining valence, still sets goals counter to what is "good". This creates a meta-good, outside the domain of traditional good/bad dichotomies, and outside the ground covered by omnibenevolence. The shift is not contained inside the meta-good, but in the extension, where it can be dialectically preserved even against a paradox, by virtue of existing entirely parallel to the mechanism of good and bad in the first place.

In either case, "any way bad" can only hold solipsistic truth. The most concrete and hardened material is softer and more fragile than you could possibly imagine.

[Anonymous No.14132309]

>>14131435
I was gonna write about an authority that controls society through linguistic prescriptivism (of a constructed language) policed harshly, the language is statically set to a comprehensive description. Basically because you can only speak within the bounds of the description it wouldn't be an entirely complete language no matter how expansive the design on paper. Actually given the nature of language this would cause it to make developments that make it complete but do not violate the description, things too subtle and contextual for the theorising of the language engineers. Different dialects could be castes, dialect corresponds to the words and constructions you need for your role/job. Effectively different castes can't coordinate and communicate higher concepts or even the basics of their life depending on how distant their lifestyles are.

imo much of the limited and group thinking today is spurred by an ideology or agent monopolising words and through them spreading the ideology or whatever particular the agent wants in the world to make use of. It also restricts art. A standard language, unless it is YOUR standard language, alongside literacy is the vehicle through which we are homogenised and broken down to docility.

[Anonymous No.14132313]

>>14131435
The Gulag Archipelago
ib4: fiction

[Anonymous No.14132401]

>>14132313
ooof

[Anonymous No.14132423]

>>14132401
shut the fuck up