Here's one of the best descriptions I've ever read on how highly authoritarian regimes maintain control and keep people behaving the way they want them to:
“Assessing the populace – checking up on it – is a principle and never-ending social activity in communist countries. If a painter is to have an exhibition, an ordinary citizen to receive a visa to a country with a seacoast, a soccer player to join the national team, then a vast array of recommendations and reports must be garnered, from the concierge, colleagues, the police, the local party organization, the person at the trade union, and added up, weighed, and summarized, by special officials. These reports have nothing to do with artistic talent, kicking ability, or maladies that respond well to salt sea air. They deal with one thing only – the citizen’s political profile. In other words, what the citizen says, what he thinks, how he behaves, how he equips himself at meetings, or May Day parades. Because everything – day-to-day existence, promotions at work, vacations – depends upon the outcome of the assessment process, everyone, whether he wants to play soccer for the national team, have an exhibition, or spend his holidays at the seaside, must behave in such a way as to deserve a favorable assessment."
-Milan Kundera in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”
It seems to me that various existing and relatively harmless social patterns and customs in relatively free countries have the potential to aid and abet such a system of control. The saying that "it's not what you know, it's who you know", for instance, or the practice of securing letters of recommendation to seek employment or admission to college. It seems to me, therefore, that people in the United States or other countries which are in danger of gradually evolving into police states, should keep a careful eye on these social patterns lest they evolve into something more sinister.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))