We are basically under constant surveillance by our peer group and family, just not in an Orwellian sense.
It's incredibly common for people to grow up afraid to say many things, having massive restrictions on some parts of their personalities due to those kinds of pressures.
We see it most obviously with the single big things such as "I can't tell my religious family I'm an atheist" or "I got ostracised for dating someone from another culture" or whatever, but it's almost certainly going on for a huge range of smaller personality facets - or ones which were blanked out before they developed.
Who would you be if you'd never had any restrictions on what you could say other than moral ones? If any interest you had, you would have been supported in following up, any comment you made would have been taken seriously and never laughed at, any attempt to better yourself was encouraged not mocked.
Maybe more and more surveillance such as you imagine will actually make it more obvious that others opinions are their largely their own problem and don't affect you all that much, and you should develop more confidence sooner.
I was trying to say that maybe total surveillance would feel less bad than occasional surveillance, since you would be forced to "get used to it" from an early age, and for things where there are no particular consequences other than embarassment, maybe that would be an improvement.
(Yet, that only applies if you assume the oversight is only for spotting criminals and the guides for criminal activity exactly agree with your own, and the system is fair).
It's incredibly common for people to grow up afraid to say many things, having massive restrictions on some parts of their personalities due to those kinds of pressures.
We see it most obviously with the single big things such as "I can't tell my religious family I'm an atheist" or "I got ostracised for dating someone from another culture" or whatever, but it's almost certainly going on for a huge range of smaller personality facets - or ones which were blanked out before they developed.
Who would you be if you'd never had any restrictions on what you could say other than moral ones? If any interest you had, you would have been supported in following up, any comment you made would have been taken seriously and never laughed at, any attempt to better yourself was encouraged not mocked.
Maybe more and more surveillance such as you imagine will actually make it more obvious that others opinions are their largely their own problem and don't affect you all that much, and you should develop more confidence sooner.
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