It seems to me that the worst fate that can befall someone is to be bereft of memory, loyalty, and principle. This was largely true of the men of Orwell’s generation, I suppose. Individualism–even though it was even then being attacked carefully and effectively by careless and incompetent thinkers–was a thread permeating their consciousnesses.
Today, though, it seems to me that through a variety of means we have created hordes of people with de facto Borderline Personality disorders. They have fractured, undeveloped personalities, and tenuous and highly conditional senses of self.
For such people, being excluded from the groups they have come to depend on for sanity is the worst fate they can suffer, and in such a world the idea of the social credit score makes more sense. It is a torture by ostracizing, a torture by removal, by shunning. And it can be fully automated. It could be overseen TODAY, most likely, by AI.
I say to myself sometimes the best you can do is stay alive, hope, and do your best to remain awake, alert, and human, in ways both good and bad. And some days that is the best I can reasonably expect from myself. I am not depressed, so much as feeling this gnawing sense of desperation, like a trap is being closed around me I cannot avoid, and which will sooner or later devour me.
I say this in a spirit of ignorance and naivete–so this may be stupid–but it feels to me like a physical battle, with bullet wounds inflicted and seen, with smoke and sound, noise and fury, would be less stressful than dealing with the looming threat of empowered collective and collectivist madness.
And I say that having read a year or two an interview with a Canadian veteran who said precisely that, that he preferred being shot at to the slow growing grayness of Trudeauism, and who in fact volunteered to go back to some hot spot somewhere. I suspect a lot of mercenaries are like that too. It is a much simpler life, and not infrequently simpler is better. You know who your enemies are, and you have every chance to shoot them. They shoot back, but there is nothing particularly personal in it.