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When I was younger, this seemed a fun sort of ideal. Now that I'm older, it sometimes seems like the only thing keeping our moderate-trust society from falling into a low-trust society is that digital everything makes the verify in "trust but verify" cheap.
A few decades back you'd see "no out of town checks" because nobody knew if your bank out of state existed. Today, merchants (maybe excepting tradesmen who have other recovery options and dislike merchant fees) often dislike checks and prefer credit cards, where the system can verify available balance before completing the transaction. The technology is certainly fallible in its own ways, but better than poorly-trained human operators is a low bar. That said, the line between "high-trust" and "totalitarian panopticon" isn't completely clear in my mind, and people occasionally call out analog high-trust societies as stifling and such.
You misunderstand the nature of high trust. In a high trust society, the panopticon is unnecessary and useless, because people do the right thing when nobody is watching. This is why the shopping cart test is what it is, because defection is consequence free.
Totalitarian regimes are inherently low trust, because the infrastructure is always built around the idea that power is unsecure and must guard itself against enemies.
"If we don't spy on everyone, people will take advantage" is not something Singaporeans or Swiss or Japanese would say about their neighbors. In fact the opposite would be their reaction, incensed indignation and disgust that someone would dare disobey the law.
I think I'd push back on that: the general examples of high-trust societies that get brought out are often either totalitarian (by American standards) and/or have very different (looser) privacy norms than Americans are used to. Singapore bans chewing gum, and is happy enough to cane tourists caught being mischievous with spray paint in ways I suspect apply to locals too. The Nordics require a degree of financial transparency that would at least make most Americans I know a bit uncomfortable. And most of these also depend heavily on distributed public stigma for violating social norms in ways that look rather like a panopticon.
I have occasionally called out Singapore as proof-of-concept that you could do totalitarianism with a neoliberal aesthetic (in the way that Nazism is totalitarianism with a right-wing nationalist aesthetic and Soviet communism is totalitarianism with a socialist aesthetic).
The amount of Singaporean life that is controlled by the state is much higher than the western right-wingers who stan the place for the strong law enforcement and lack of redistribution would accept. As well as things like chewing gum bans, there is:
If we accept the definition of totalitarianism as "nothing outside/against the state" and the existence a sliding scale from liberal pluralism to totalitarianism, I would say that Singapore is the second most totalitarian rich country after Saudi.
Maybe it's some other right-wingers you're talking about, but it all looks alright to me, mate.
If anything it's the neoliberals who seem like LARPers to me. They're all like "look at all the meritocracy and race-mixing", but have no stomach for the death penalty and corporal punishment. Like please, the same people who pearl-clutch over Bukele want to play Lee Kuan Yew stans?
All the LKW stans I've known have either been right-wing or (very confused) libertarians.
Recently-ish, a bunch of Elite Human Capitals started acting like he's Their Guy.
Which he is. LKYism is government by and for Elite Human Capital, with mercenary Gurkha riot police to manage the working class. Whereas General Park in South Korea (which went from third world to first around the same time using a different set of harsh-but-effective methods) was much more friendly to traditional plutocrats.
They would be, if EHCers were actual human capital, that happened to be elite. Sadly they're not. LKY is a basic right-wing authoritarian, and like I said, if EHCers want to claim him they better stop squirming at the policies that make his model even possible. As it stands, it looks like a desperate bid of a bunch of teacher's pets to look edgy,
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