Ultimately, opponents of the impending police state have one thing going for them: it will not work. A telling detail of Orwell's 1984 is the dreary destitution of the society it depicts. Command and control apparatuses are unproductive and cost a lot of money. On a deeper level, threats, blackmail, and rule by brute force are incompatible with human nature, productive endeavor, or progress. If people are supposedly unfit for freedom―the ability to run their own lives―then they are even more unfit to coercively run other people’s lives. Try as statists might to obscure it, two diverging trends clearly emerge from even a cursory study of human history: mankind only thrives and grows under conditions approaching freedom, and every social unit based on force fails.

There will always be those craven, pathetic excuses for human beings who will take their daily ration of gruel and accept what the government does without question or challenge. But it is free, independent minds who discover, invent, imagine, invest, take risks, build mankind’s store of knowledge, and pull it forward. Every miserable dictator and would be dictator since human society began has eventually discovered that free minds do not think under threat of a club, spear, sword, gun, thermonuclear device, concentration camp, or gas chamber; thought and freedom are inseparable. When they try to kill freedom, and consequently the mind, they sign their own death warrant.