Huxley's World State doesn't need to punish dissent, because it has engineered dissent out of existence before birth. Citizens are conditioned from decanting through hypnopaedia and caste-based genetic design to want exactly what the state needs them to want. There is no resistance to crush, because there is nothing left to resist with.
Control runs on three supports: genetic engineering that sorts people into castes before they're born, sleep-conditioning that installs the values those castes are supposed to hold, and soma — a drug that erases any friction those values fail to prevent. Where Orwell's state controls through fear, Huxley's controls through the absence of any reason to object.
The core insight — that a population can be pacified through pleasure and distraction more durably than through fear — describes something real about attention economies, engagement-optimized media, and consumer culture generally. Huxley worried people would come to love their own oppression; the mechanism of "give them enough to consume and they'll stop asking questions" reads as more prescient with each passing decade.
The book imagines total, centralized genetic and psychological engineering — a level of coordinated top-down design that hasn't materialized. What has emerged looks less like one state's five-year plan and more like an uncoordinated, decentralized version of the same incentive: many separate companies, each optimizing for engagement, arriving at similar effects without anyone designing the outcome on purpose.
Engagement-optimized apps, algorithmic content feeds, and pharmaceutical or recreational responses to dissatisfaction all echo the soma mechanism in miniature — comfort substituting for resistance. See Surveillance Notes for dated, sourced examples.