Blaming governments is great fun, of course, but we are, in fact, all doing it to ourselves and each other.

Even a simple thing like hundreds of thousands people in The Netherlands standing still in traffic for hours every day to get to jobs they don't like is stunning. It absorbs so much time and energy that there is little time left for critical thought, but everybody feels they have no choice, yet the same everybody built this society together removing said choice.

Just a tiny simple example.

Add entertainment and advertising to general tiredness and lack-of-time and making-a-living pressures and keeping-up-with-the-Joneses and before you know it you have a malleable population without much knowledge or interest beyond their specialisation. Opportunists in politics and corporations do the rest, but I doubt they started this all.

And yes, books. A few more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Perfect_Day
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_%28novel%29

Two of the oldest in the genre:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Heel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_%28novel%29