There's no reason "instead" always has to be accompanied by "of," but you'd have to construct the sentence differently; when you remove "of," the "instead" points to something different. Let's take a simpler sentence:
I ran away instead of talking to you.
You did run away, and didn't talk. The complement to "instead of" is "talking." But you could also say:
I didn't talk to you, instead running away.
Now "instead" modifies "running"; "instead" has been pulled into the service of the positive statement rather than the negative one. This sentence works only because I negated "talk."
Your example sentence is hampered by the fact that the subject is "nothing." It isn't a negation; the concept of "nothing" does in fact do something ("makes you think"). So we run into a problem when we look for a subject for the second half of the sentence: "Nothing" "coaxes you into forgetting"? Oh dear.
The sentence would work if you recast it with a positive subject but with "think" negated:
[Bradbury's dystopian government] never makes you think for yourself, instead coaxing you into...