Bread and circuses

I am back in China for the first time since 2019. The changes are incremental but the surveillance state is complete.

The general acceptance of Live Facial Recognition is so extensive that you can walk up to a screen at the airport and it will recognise you and display you flight details and gate number (large enough for everyone else to see too). Even going through the turnstiles to enter a public toilet there was a screen showing your face being captured.

The Great Firewall is more effective too. I cannot access anything work related on a WiFi network and my student can't on his Chinese phone. But I am able to do everything I want, including using VPNs and end-to-end encryption, on my UK SIM card. It seems anyone reliably identified as a visitor has greater digital rights.

What strikes me most in this almost perfect totalitarian state where complete surveillance is used to ensure very rigid social conformity, is that the 20th century dystopians were wrong about how such a state would induce acceptance. China has achieved this without the sex and drugs hedonism of Huxley's Brave New World nor the mutual fear and suspicion of others imagined in Orwell's 1984. The Chinese are friendly, trusting and sociable towards each other, happy in their mutual conformity to strict codes of behaviour which produce low crime and social stability.

Their 'bread an circuses' are what every western neoconservative dreams of:

1. Consumerism in the form of an insatiable desires for toys (clothes to gadgets) and restaurant eating (with vast choice of foods).
2. A social life built entirely around the workplace and the nuclear family.
3. Job security dependent only on long hours and unquestioning obedience.

Perhaps this is human flourishing - happiness or eudaimonia - for real people, normal people, and any sense of disquiet with it derives from the narrow obsessions of intellectuals. I hope not, but then I would say that, wouldn't I?

If it is the answer to the question of what is a good life for humans, it is one that cannot be achieved at scale without destroying the planet's habitability for us (and many, many other species) and thus causing human extinction. It would then seem the species has the same built-in obsolescence as the toys which satisfy it.