Brave New World
There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays), it is demonstrably inefficient and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is a sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude…The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government sponsored inquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will call “the problem of happiness.”
Sometimes you do insane things for your friends. Not just any friends, obviously - the ones you love some kind of special fierce. The ones you can’t bear to disappoint. So there you are, washing your underwear in some stranger’s sink in the Castro district of San Fransisco; or carving horrible inappropriate phrases into watermelons that will be left to rot on some ex-boyfriend’s doorstep; or carrying a heavy wooden family-heirloom cross uphill for half a mile to a wedding reception.
I use to classify my fascination with the machinery of power as, well, a “fascination.” It sounds so much more innocuous that way. Not like it could color the way you see everything, or say, be an unhealthy obsession with some secular version of fate.