u/Emotional-Tale-1462

All the world leaders have to participate in a remake of the Movie Cats. So all world leaders have that CGI visual effects of that strange half human, half cat look and each world leaders gets a take of them licking their butthole like how cats do.

How do you react to such a thing and what is the likely impact for the world?

And your impressions of what your nations leader would look like in that Cat form and your opinions of them after seeing them like that?

And if you saw and imagined that in your head right now hahahaha!

When US society was completely redesigned by the commanders into a zealously religious, fascistic, tyrannical theocracy that we know as Gilead, its crazy the changes they managed to make in such a drastic short time span.

However its shown in flashbacks that the changes were incremental that people "brushed political statements off as hyperbole" when the political language in the country changed with the statements on women, gays etc It's like the boiling frog, incremental change makes the changes easily survivable, to adapt or dismiss, but then it passes the point where commander's oligarchic decree replaces parliamentary/legal process and becomes an avalanche you can't ignore, in the show we saw:

the law changes limited women from work and then eventually owning property entirely and at a certain point a threshold was passed (possibly after the coup/crisis) in which changes could be enacted and passed by decree with no oversight, being made effective immediately and suddenly the incremental change was a tsunami of repressive changes morphing into the dystopic beast we know as Gilead.

A society once open with freedom for all peoples to rise, gain promotion and with social mobility suddenly had an incredibly rigid class and hierarchy structure to the point that fashion even color coded citizens into their class with social mobility between classes nearly non existent and completely dictated by men

The architects of Gilead also went all out in emphasizing the importance of ritual's in daily life. There's the ritual that handmaids go through which involves the whole household where the handmaid kneels before the commander, wife and witnessing martha's and guardians before conducting the "ceremony", and in the testaments the obsessive amount of ritual's the girls have to go through, the change in their colour coded clothing from pink to plum, and then reaching women hood with the baptism ceremony in the pool to become a "green", the tea pouring ceremony, the gilead version of a "prom" which had elements of mass synchronized performances similar to the Arirang mass games in the DPRK but on a much smaller scale

What we saw with Agnes and the other "greens" was the more high status society rituals with their mothers wearing the blue/teal of the wives of commanders. And in the Handmaids tale show we saw a different kind of ritual for "low status" men like guardians and "eyes" being married in a mass wedding ceremony with young econo-wives like Nick and Eden that didnt even get to dance or choose their wife they were both told "you've being assigned a spouse" and then mass married off with community as witness

And while everything about the Gilead system disempowers women, there are some rituals and propaganda that does it's best to provide women with an illusion of how powerful they are over men. Even in the scene of the "assembly", the power of women "tempted" the man to masturbate and as a result he was going to have his hand cut off, with the sentence being carried out by women, and the Aunt's even asking up to the young school girls if he deserves punishment and the girls all screaming "by his hand!" to "punish him", giving the illusion that the women do have power in Gilead so much infact that they have the power to tempt men, as well as to punish them horrifically, even in the Handmaids tale with the Particicution where the handmaids bludgeon the guardian to death where they get to execute men personally, which gives a false sense of power because really that's not real power over men, there just being used to enforce barbaric cruel and unusual punishment and execution publicly to spread fear among all social classes based on the contexts of when such rituals are conducted

Public Execution in Gilead is also used as a form of ritual and enforce the values and expectations of the society, and giving women the power to be the executioner seem's like an attempt to spread that illusion of what women empowerment in Gilead looks like "See, how can you say your powerless in Gilead, your literally killing and punishing evil wicked men all the time!", its like Evil disguised as righteousness, "Godly" righteousness

Ritual's create belonging and identity, and also normalizes the abnormal through repetition and the rituals inviolving violence like the school assemblies or particicution get women complicit and involved in the violence against men and other women

Like most people craving and wielding power, the Gilead ideology doesnt unify, it uses the classic divide the conquer strategy, pitting each of the social classes against each other:

Econowives and Economen threatened with the wall or becoming handmaids, not to trust anyone

Martha's treated as slaves, not to get too close or trust anyone

Handmaid's brutalized by aunts and others, not to trust anyone

Guardian's and eyes, spying and maintaining order, not to trust anyone

Aunts keeping control over women, not to trust anyone

Wives, given an illusion of power also controlled and dont trust anyone, even your husband could be fooling around at a Jezebel's and distrust of other women

Commanders, dictating and abusing power, not trusting anyone

women, dont trust men or even other women

men, dont trust women or even other men

its an incredibly paranoid, low trust society and fear is everywhere among every social class and like all Dystopia's the classic boogey man enemy in the form of "may day terrorists". This is "Atomisation" in which horizontal bonds between people are destroyed until its just a vertical relationship between citizen and state.

Despite this extreme form of division through hierarchy and state terror, there is the illusion of the false unity that all members of Gilead society have their "sacred role" for their mission even though most members of society can never fully trust anyone and everyone is being pitted against one another, while the Commanders dictate over their districts and most commanders are not even true believers, they are just powerful men taking advantage of a system that hardly ever holds them to account and allows them to act with impunity

The system is also structured in a way to keep people, women in particular, ignorant, not knowing their own body (Agnes saying "your not meant to talk about your body"), and ignorant of the outside world, ignorant of the sciences, politics, even religion, sexuality, all of it, to narrow the range of thought a citizen is capable of having, those who are curious, who seek answers on any subject find it near impossible, and also dangerous to access that information and answers, knowledge has become gate kept by Commanders, by aunts, and all the other social classes in Gilead have their own "in the know" knowledge that is not shared with the other's.

Laurence attempted to reform and liberalize the system, but failed with the Boston uprising and Gilead clamping right back down and probably cancelling out any further hope of any such reforms after that

Anyway those were my observations of the Gilead system, thought I'd share my thoughts. What are your perspectives on any of this? and do you guys recognize any of these tyrannical methods playing out in your own society and how we are being atomized, divided and conquered by "Wicked godless men!" as aunt Lydia would scream haha