Welcome Your Promiscuous Overlords

More from The Atlantic:

So citizens of a Pink Police State (I should say subjects) are apt to surrender more and more political liberty in exchange for more and more cultural or ‘personal’ license. And the government of a Pink Police State tends to monopolize and totalize administrative control while carving out a permissive playpen for the people. This tradeoff has a creepy economic component. Already, in places like Russia, China, the Gulf states, and Singapore, we see the machinations of a new ‘laboratory of autocracy’, as oppressive regimes grant wealthy residents de facto privileges to all the sin money can buy. As I’ve asked in our own context, however, how many hipsters are too poor to party? Next to the al Qaeda neanderthals, the harbingers of the Pink Police State pose a far more frightening and serious challenge to the Western model of social order. Nobody frets, like many of our intellectuals did over Stalinism, that maybe Osama got it right. There’s more to worry about when we see China’s youth consent en masse to equality in servitude in the shadow of Macau, Earth’s biggest gambling mecca. Of course the freaky environs of Dubai are a stone’s throw from the real Mecca. The secret depths of perversity and abuse at the ‘frontiers of the West’ — pent-up porn, sex slavery, the whole network reaching from the Baltics through the Balkans, down into the Gulf, and out to Indochina — really needs to be told. But our rapt attention is held instead by Bruno.

I think of the denizens of Huxley’s Brave New World, happy in their libidinous despotism, not missing at all the culture and freedom that their ancestors had painstakingly amassed and defended for a thousand years.  I was in my late teens before I realized that there were people for whom the book wasn’t a nightmare but a dream to which they were eagerly looking forward.  Oy, what a world!  Where’s my soma?