Live Not By Lies is a good primer for combating the soft totalitarianism of our age. Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option, relays several first hand accounts of Christians who lived through the communist totalitarianism of the Cold War and gives us modern dissidents a few tips on how we can make it through our increasingly bleak future.

He does a good job summarizing the threat, although in the short few months since this book was published, we’ve already seen the totalitarianism ratchet up. Whereas Dreher optimistically wrote that we wouldn’t seen such things as memory-holing events or people in our soft totalitarianism, it’s actually happening. And Dreher seems to think that the modern totalitarianism will be carried out mainly by Big Tech, whereas the reactions of the rabid Democratic mob in reaction to Trump and the people who dare question the blatant election fraud indicate the government will be leading the authoritarian charge.

The author sees our plight being that of the protagonists, not of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but of Huxley’s Brave New World. “Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the novel that previews what’s coming; it’s rather Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World … [one] in which people will surrender political rights in exchange for guarantees of personal pleasure.”

Dreher rightly acknowledges that while Christians aren’t called to seek out suffering, we should endure it and make the most of it. Our reward is not of this world.

The main takeaway Dreher recommends is that Christians band together in many small groups with other people of good will to preserve the truth and to endure the lie. Small groups helped Christians keep hope alive behind the Iron Curtain and even in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s USSR.

Dreher doesn’t give us any specifics beyond just enduring. It’s likely his understanding that totalitarian regimes will self-destruct eventually as the Soviet Union did. Unfortunately in our case, there is no opposing superpower pushing us toward a free society. The totalitarians have control over the only remaining superpowers and we may need more than small groups to endure.