1984 would have been a better book if Orwell had read Gramsci and cultural hegemony. All everyone ever talks about when discussing that book is how the state surveils people, controls the narrative, suppresses dissent, etc. It's important to know how the state uses the stick, but it's equally as important to know how the state uses the carrot. Or maybe the problem is that people treat the book like the essential political treatise of the modern era instead of as an interesting science fiction novel