Want to know how YOU can turn thousands—or even millions—of people into your happy, thankful slaves? You've come to the right place! It's tons of fun and super easy - so easy that anyone can do it with only a little bit of study and preparation! :)
Overview:
To begin with, you first have to understand that all individuals within any society perpetuate social rule by default—benign and restrictive alike—unless they take conscious steps to act against it. This is the nature of a society; it's an organism which, once birthed, exists only to keep itself alive. The key to keeping a society of people enslaved, thus, is first to get them IN a society built around rules of YOUR choice. Later on, you'll then take steps to make sure they always feel like they have a better option *within* society than any other possible option *outside* society. (People are generally pretty stupid - so this is actually quite easy). Then, once you have them invested in remaining trapped within your society, you must create a comfortable cycle of distractions and lead them to a state of self-conditioned reliance upon said cycle - so they don't decide to change their minds.
*****STAGE ONE:*****
Okay - so, you've got a population of people believing that you know what's best for them. They've all come together in one spot more or less, and are looking to you for guidance. What next? The bait and switch, that's what. The "magic trick" to herding your population into indefinite slavery is to progressively marginalize them while simultaneously flattering them to greater and greater extents. You need to start taking away their freedoms, now - but you must make certain that they're thanking you for it. With a little bit of perceptive smoke and mirrors, this is an easy task - made even easier as your population grows, as the increasing density steadily destroys any possibility of maintaining effective or useful communication between members of your society. A melting pot reduces everybody to the lowest common denominator, so open your doors WIDE and beg them to let you lead them! Your biggest ally here will be simple human nature: there is no maximum limit to the size of your populace's inflated ego - and if you steadily inflate it until it's so big that it blots out the light of the truth just by being there, you can start to do whatever the hell you want with reality while your slaves vegetate in their own little self-centric worlds. Behind closed doors, politicians affectionately call this one the "freedom shitwich." This is basically what it sounds like:
"You don't need (this)! You're the best bunch of human beings that've ever lived, and it just boils my blood to know that so-and-so is trying to make you dependent upon such-and-such that you don't need. Your lives are far too precious to be wasted on lies and false agendas! I want you to be able to focus on YOU - to put the power back in YOUR hands to make your OWN decisions, without having to cater to the demands of people or corporations who think they can own you. You aren't slaves! I'm determined to fight for your right to stay free. To start with, I'm going to promise to make sure you aren't *robbed* of the truly precious things in life at the hands of silly distractions; we're going to help you out by taking those annoying distractions away for you - as a courtesy for your being such a stand-up human being, and as a salute to your staying true to the ideals and principles that have made you all into such a uniquely righteous nation. Oh, no, it's no trouble - of course, you're welcome. More than that, though, thank YOU for just being you... because, really, at the end of the day that's ALL that matters, right?"
*****STAGE TWO:*****
This method will work well for a number of decades, but eventually a population will begin to recognize the stark absence of certain intrinsic qualities of life, and after a bit more time will then begin to question where such necessities have gone. To prevent this from getting out of hand, all that's needed is a bit of preventive maintenance. One must simply convince your populace that they deserve better than to *have* to fight for their freedoms. Convince them that just being upset and vocal about it *should* be all that they have to do - because they *deserve* to be listened to. Once they start voicing their anger, don't fight them; instead, in the first stages of public unrest you should position your voice parallel to theirs and give them the leadership they desperately need. Promise to lead them from their despairing situation - and make sure you shout your "solution" louder than the crowd cries out in complaint. It's trivially easy to accomplish this because the notion of entitlement and self-fixing problems appeals almost IRRESISTIBLY to the unchecked egos of the uncritical and under-educated masses; once you seed their minds with a subtle and indirect hint of your idea, almost everyone will immediately believe that they invented it themselves - and that, thus, it must be correct. By giving them a direction—any direction—you'll give them an outlet through which to express their frustration and air their righteous indignation; it'll make them feel better temporarily because they will feel as if they are doing *something* about (something). Their momentum will quickly fade as they begin to experience their emotional catharsis, and as your problem solves itself it will begin to preemptively prevent itself from reoccurring: courtesy of the human brain's careful chemical administrations of behavioral motivations and deterrents, they will quickly learn that they may depend upon this temporary catharsis whenever they start to feel trapped in the future. They will return to it, time after time, oblivious to other possibilities, with eagerness - at first because they become upset over something else, but eventually... because they need the short-term release, and they miss it when life is "normal." It's a self-sustaining cycle that not only fuels itself but also generates its own constantly-increasing momentum and preserves its own inertia. After numerous enough iterations they will eventually soothe themselves into a life of discordant—but silent—resignation. Cognitive dissonance is now your lieutenant; at this point, you can sit back, relax, and perfect your strategy - filling in the gaps as they arise.
*****STAGE THREE:*****
Maintain and hone. Focus on identifying and supporting environmental opportunities to keep your populace ignorant and content. Belief, especially, is vital if you can introduce it into your population's culture. Myths and stories of the supernatural must be encouraged, researched and publicized, and even planted for discovery; meanwhile, your regime's advances in science must be either hidden or else "spun" such that they do not interfere with the cognitive dissonance mechanisms of your population. Encourage individuals to empower themselves with trivial and arbitrary identities as they see fit - the more irrational, the better. Your most useful weapons of opportunity will be anything that can keep them focused on themselves instead of on the reality beyond themselves. They will create these delusions on their own, as a natural result of their coping mechanisms constantly adapting to your careful control over them. Simply smile, nod, and encourage it - but do not be over-eager to applaud them, or they will become suspicious and may question your motives. Gently stoke the fires of their beliefs in... whatever they come up with to believe in. The entire process of perpetual enslavement relies on cognitive dissonance - and belief is the simplest and most fundamental form of this essential slaver's tool. If enough people believe in something—in anything, really—their minds will already be primed in advance to openly receive their leaders' circuitous and meaningless rhetoric. They won't question your hollow explanations because they will "seem" reasonable upon initial appearance - and, because they are already accustomed to accepting their perceptions of initial appearance (belief) as bonafide fact, there is little or no danger of their ever digging any deeper. Belief is a tyrant's best friend! Don't neglect it if you expect your social cage to stand for more than a few hundred measly years.
Summary:
Using the above tools, you can guide people into turning their own belief, human nature and incidental emotional discord into invincible cages. Strengthen them by actively encouraging and affirming your population's sense of divine entitlement, and instead of straining at the bars they will then resolve themselves to simply yelling at the bars to open - and then yelling at each other when nothing happens. All a potential captor must do is open the door just a little bit at first, bait a careful trap, and wait for the prey to hurry inside to its doom. The rest is all down hill, as they say!
Once a population is enslaved in this fashion, the most efficient way of keeping them slaves is to guarantee that their predictable efforts to escape will instead result only in the tightening of their bonds. If a modicum of effort is invested in making this constriction *appear* instead to be a "loosening," the efficiency of the tactic is increased even further. Manipulate their environments to force them into making rash, uncalculated, instinctual reactions out of fear - and ensure that the immediate results of those reactions are perceptibly cathartic... but that the *net* result is controllable and works in favor of your agenda.
Guide their actions into a circular reality in this manner for only a few generations - and, once everyone alive can remember only the familiar orbit of your machinations, they and their future generations will practically guide themselves from that point on.
