4 ideas
At the Futurological Congress in Costa Rica, the government puts hallucinogenic 'benignimizers' in the water supply to put down a revolt, and Ijon Tichy ends up frozen and revived in 2098 into a seemingly lush, peaceful world. The last reveal is that the whole future may itself be a hallucination Tichy is having in the Hilton sewer.
Instead of fixing material conditions, the state rules by adding psychoactive compounds to the air and water that decide what citizens see and feel. Emotions, beliefs, and even religious conviction come as dosed products, so dissent is treated as a pharmacological problem, not a political one. Control shifts from changing the world to changing the sensorium that reports on it.
Each antidote that strips away one illusion may itself sit inside a deeper illusion, so being disillusioned is no proof that you have reached reality. The feeling of 'finally seeing clearly' comes from the drug or frame you are currently under, so it cannot certify itself. Read this way, any exposé or awakening narrative is best treated as one more layer, not the ground floor.
When pleasant perception is chemically decoupled from actual conditions, the feedback that would prompt correction vanishes, so overpopulation, famine, and ecological ruin get worse unseen. The hallucination does not replace the problem; it removes the signal that would force anyone to address it. A comfortable illusion therefore compounds the damage it conceals.