Living in dystopia

In literature, the study of a utopian society that has unraveled over time or spiraled far away from its utopian ideas is called a study of dystopia.  Two of the most studied of all dystopian novels in the United States are 1984 and Brave New World.

People have grown to disdain intrusion into privacy since our country's inception.  1984 shows a great departure from the premise of a treasured American value because a government has been created that intrudes to a major extent into people's private lives.  A leader (probably manufactured by The Party) knows almost every move of the society's citizens.  The Party revises all events from history and its current events to fit the official party line of the government.  Individual thinking is named a thoughtcrime.  Mind control is everywhere present in the book.  Doublethink and Newspeak are terms that were coined in the book to represent the type of mind control taking place.

Brave New World is a world created to show what would happen in a society controlled by a one-world government.  Sex in the book is experienced for pleasure only; it has nothing to do with propagation of the species.  A person is supposed to experience multiple sex partners in a lifetime.  Multiple might be the wrong word because in the book multiple could mean 50 to 100 not 10 or less.  People are born from test tubes and designed genetically to have a certain amount of intelligence.  This allows for a caste system to ensure that menial work gets done by the lowest thinking humans and the research in science gets done by the highest thinking humans.  Children are raised in schools run by the State.  Everyone in the society takes Soma, a drug to make people feel good, and it is passed out free to citizens to make sure that everyone is taking it.

The society of Big Brother was eschewed by the people of England and the United States in 1949 when Orwell wrote 1984.  And the readers of both countries thought Aldous Huxley was way out of bounds when he wrote of the World Controllers in 1932.  The book was banned in some places.

Let's see... Fast forward 80 years from Huxley's time and 63 years from Orwell's day.  I live in a society that
1) sends a ticket to me by mail if I run a red light because a camera was monitoring the intersection,
2) sends a bill to me by mail for my toll usage because a camera snapped my presence on the toll road,
3) can tell my location on Facebook (if enabled by me, at least for now) when I make an entry,
4) can show who I am with and my activity when I am tagged in Facebook,
5) tracks every single call I make on the phone (and my emails, and my texts, and my voice messages),
6) requires all children to go to a state-run school to obtain a standardized curriculum approved by the state (with an exception for home-schooling, which few people opt for),
7) encourages young people to choose multiple sex partners (5 or more is common among seniors in high school, so this is only through age 18),
8) forces all its citizens to pay an income tax for access by underdogs of the state and has just now added access to insurance to that list, (disincentives for people to perfect their life's crafts and charge for it),
9) allows revisionist history to exist on all major networks and many cable networks and to align with one of the two major parties' official lines,
10) pays for drugs (generics are basically costless) of all kinds of diseases, regardless of side-effects, so people can be addicted to feeling good constantly.
11) has deceived the public about intelligence and grading practices in its schools, so that now people think there are levels of intelligence, and they make decisions about careers based on those ideas as if they were born that way (such as restricting jobs to certain levels of educational attainment),
12) puts forth charismatic leaders as puppets of the party in power to further agendas of the party.

This list is incomplete, but one gets the idea.  Every major, onerous, dystopian idea proffered by both books has been incorporated in today's society in the U.S. either in whole or to a great extent.  There are books about what society will look like in another 60-80 years, but I will be cryogenically stored on a space vessel headed for terraformed Mars for a life outside of that society.  It's hard enough to live in the one we have today.