And it HIT ME, just now, that the scene when Johnathan Pryce is brought in to be tortured by Michael Palin, where the guard says “don’t hold out too long or it will affect your credit score” is LITERALLY—and by literally I mean literally—what they have built in China.
There, if someone suspects you of something or other, and they arrest you, and they interrogate you, failing to confess a crime—even one you did not commit—could literally be a strike against your social credit score. What may be termed Hyperconfessionalism is a key element in Maoist Bros washing, and there is zero reason to suppose it does not survive even today, particularly behind locked gates and tall walls.
And I will emphasize that, even though formally and dogmatically atheist, Communism as an ideal still had what might be termed a spiritual component. It was going to improve humanity, right wrongs, usher in peace, harmony, happiness and pervasive well being.
But don’t you just KNOW that Chinese women married to powerful men are just as obsessed with beauty and plastic surgery as the women were in Brazil?
50 plus million dead, and the dominant national ideal is compliant plastic people without original thoughts of any sort, trained from birth to work, consume, submit, and die.
How could any intellectual who retains a residual belief in ANYTHING not consider this ludicrous?
I remember the 80’s, any way, with the punk and post punk anger at thoughtless consumerism, the exportation of the suburban cultural ethos to everyone. This ethos is now, as far as I can tell, State dogma.
”Don’t do anything we do anything we don’t like”, the State tells the people, “or you won’t be able to buy tickets to see your favorite pop star.”
Seek freedom. Not just political freedom, but mental and emotional freedom. See the cage you built to protect you so long ago, and open the gate and walk out. I don’t know what will happen, and neither can you, but it WILL change you.