It is also Offred's inability to see Moira and the subjects of her past as any more than still images of nostalgia. In this way she resigns from her future, longs for her past, allows herself to be complacent in what happens so long as she can remind herself and keep the night to herself.

There is also ironic recreation of the past, active structuring and processing. She is active, ironically, in the night. She is complacent in Gilead during the day. Which says something very odd and wrong about how one can only live in a sinful world -- too perfect and everything becomes stale... she is alive in the past.

17:24 "Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature. The quaint old forms — elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest — will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial — but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."<br /> -- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)

aka: soft power. psychowar. aggressive exploitation of human stupidity.

we have two worlds: public and private = day and night.<br /> everything in public life is optimized for idiots = neurotics = socialists and nationalists.<br /> smart people are forced to hide in private life = psychotics = communists and fascists.<br /> the basis for this division are personality types, which are inborn and stable for life.<br /> this means, idiots are physically trapped in their stupidity (in plato's cave),<br /> and all forms of "education" can only hide that stupidity.<br /> idiots are physically blind to conspiracies, high-level organized crime, slavery.<br /> so the challenge is to find a better symbiosis between stupid and smart people.