I hate this sort of thinking. You are making the implicit assumption that everything about our social environment happens simply on 1 variable: heavy-handed enforcement.
When I put it like this, I hope you can see that it doesn't work like that. There are hundreds of variables you could change that would affect everything. We can prevent Congress storming (it was, btw, Congress, not the White House, that got stormed) without moving even 1 micrometer in the direction of reeducation camps.
I’m not sure. About half a year ago I’ve put a perfectly good sign, kindly asking to let the grass recover on my front yard. The grass was getting a bit too much of dog urine, from the dog owners trespassing onto my property to urinate their dogs and poop there.
You’d think that the kind neighbors could read and pause for a bit. But no. They care about their pets. And happily let them go, resulting in the damage to landscaping and the bills to clear contaminated ground and replace the grass.
I’m guessing these are the same people who wouldn’t wear a mask and spread their disease somehow, during the pandemic.
I initially read the comment you are responding to differently, in that I saw the ‘observer’ in the statement as not the state but the community, on re-reading I’m not sure that makes sense.
All the same, reading HN politics, it often seems that a spectrum is presented that spans from freedom to state oppression.
There are democracies where the public will not accept the state using power for its own benefit, but is comfortable with the state enforcing the social contract, because there is a stronger sense that this is defined democratically. This may be simply a matter of population size, the state in a nation of 20 million is a different beast to a state of 350m
This brings up another question... How is a social contract defined when you have 20m people and 50m AI enabled bots forming relationships with them trying to change their mind on said social contract?
When I put it like this, I hope you can see that it doesn't work like that. There are hundreds of variables you could change that would affect everything. We can prevent Congress storming (it was, btw, Congress, not the White House, that got stormed) without moving even 1 micrometer in the direction of reeducation camps.