The only difference is that their delusions are much more widely shared, and that the mechanisms used to brainwash them are much more high-budget and sophisticated. The mainstream worldview is really just a mass-produced artificial psychosis.

It's actually difficult to wrap your mind around the scale and pervasiveness of the mountain of lies upon which this dystopian civilization is built. You think you're starting to get a read on things, then you gain more knowledge and insight and realize it goes so much further than you thought. You start pulling on one thread, maybe some obvious lie about Iraq or Palestine or whatever, and the whole thing just keeps unraveling and unraveling and unraveling. Before you know it you're staring at a society that is not just riddled with untruth, but actually woven entirely from the fabric of untruth.

Everything. How your nation really works. How the world really works. How capitalism really works. What politics really are. What the media are really used for. What laws are really used for. What wars and militarism are really used for. What ideology is really used for. What religion is really used for. What culture is really used for. What rules and etiquette are really used for. It's all made-up narrative all the way down, and all of those narratives are made up by the powerful, in the service of the powerful.

You can tell someone's still playing in the shallow end of the pool of political insight based on how much time they spend freaking out about a dark dystopian future, because it shows the extent to which they fail to perceive how profoundly unfree we are right here and now. Right wingers, ideologically prohibited from considering the possibility that what they're experiencing under capitalism isn't real freedom, spend their time freaking out about a neo-Marxist future where everyone's trapped in 15-minute cities and forced to take poisonous vaccines and eat bugs. Western liberals, ideologically prohibited from considering the possibility they live under the world's most tyrannical power structure and that everything they were taught is a lie, spend their time freaking out about a future under a horrible Trumpian dictatorship.