3 ideas
Citizens in 1940s Sydney keep the vote, the parties and the vocabulary of freedom, but real decisions are made by concentrated economic and state power beyond their reach. Because the forms of democracy survive, people do not notice the substance draining away until it cannot be recovered. Collapse then looks sudden, though it was the end of a long transfer of control that went unexamined.
Ord's evidence can establish what happened, but only the novelist's invented inner lives can suggest why people acted as they did. History seen this way is an imaginative act. The future's picture of the past is always a construction shaped by the needs and assumptions of the present that builds it.
Knarf's 24th-century commune has solved want through planning and shared ownership, yet its people debate whether they have real freedom or only comfort handed to them by the system. Removing scarcity does not settle the question of self-determination. A society can meet every material need while leaving citizens little real say in the choices that shape them.