# Dystopian worlds where the government controls everything but still rampant crime, unrealistic? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 8, 2020, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381 "2020-04-08T22:29:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 19\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Asuka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@Asuka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Asuka)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2020, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/1 "2020-04-08T22:29:03Z")
A decade ago I remember reading a literary article about how most dystopian fiction makes the common mistake of being set in a world with a strong central government that has mass surveillance on everyone, controls almost every facet of the average persons life, and can very easily kill you if you step out of line, and justifies it by saying that at least there’s law and order now but then pair it with the idea that there’s also mass crime everywhere that you can’t even walk the streets in the daytime without being set-upon by muggers/thugs and being forced to pay protection from them too. The idea being, a central government with that much power wouldn’t allow such a thriving crime enterprise to spring up since in theory if they control everything they wouldn’t allow the average person to still be exploited by people that aren’t them and they only remain in power because they can at least justify their hold by saying you’re at least safe if you keep your head down and follow the rules. V for Vendetta was one of the examples they use of poor worldbuilding, but I was curious if you think this actually holds true. In Nazi Germany would someone still be in danger of being robbed by criminals on the street more so than they would in “normal” times? ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2020, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/2 "2020-04-08T22:50:18Z")
Hard to say what’s realistic or not in science fiction. I can say that in several real-world dystopias, crime was often frequent and ignored by the authorities, at least to a degree. For example, in Stalin’s USSR, quite a bit of random crime was tolerated as the authorities didn’t really care. Crime statistics were invented as convenient anyway, and ordinary criminals were no threat to the power structure. Of course, crooks knew _very_ well not to mess with Party officials, but everyday people had no such protection. In fact, criminals could be very useful to keep political prisoners in line. Everything depends on exactly what behavior the government condones, represses, or ignores. Solzhenitsyn talks about this in The Gulag Archipelago - I think in the first volume. ---
**Author:** ![jackdavinci](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackdavinci/32/3259_2.png) [@jackdavinci](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackdavinci)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2020, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/3 "2020-04-08T22:53:04Z")
It’s probably important to use some other metric than crime (your mugging example is a good start). Crime just means illegal. In a fascist state, more things are made illegal, so there is more crime just on a technicality. Plus, there is motivation to keep arresting a certain number of people just to keep the populace afraid. The policing will be corrupt, so they will put more resources into preventing sedition and opposition than citizen on citizen crime. In fact they may even subtly encourage crime to create dependence. On the other hand, a non fascist surveillance state or social credit system might accomplish something like that, with it’s own cost/benefit tradeoffs. ---
**Author:** ![Chingon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chingon/32/17645_2.png) [@Chingon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chingon)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2020, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/4 "2020-04-08T22:56:39Z")
Ghettos and the like are left to their own devices… unless they cause a direct problem for the state. The underclass is isolated and left lawless. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2020, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/5 "2020-04-08T23:09:17Z")
> [@Chingon](#): > > Ghettos and the like are left to their own devices… unless they cause a direct problem for the state. The underclass is isolated and left lawless. Right. In places like Brazil, the favelas were still lawless under authoritarian governments. The government doesn’t care as long as poor people are just exploiting one another. It’s only when crime threatens the wealthy or government interests that it needs to be controlled. ---
**Author:** ![Banksiaman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banksiaman/32/3334_2.png) [@Banksiaman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banksiaman)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2020, 10:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/6 "2020-04-09T10:10:33Z")
A characteristic of fascism is that rule is through direct exercise of power, which in a government can be through overt surveillance and policing and control over people’s lives or through its agents, which can include these gangs and criminals. Conforming to the state’s desires increases your power and disobedience ratchets up power imposed on you. There is no necessary contradiction with criminality being tolerated as long as it serves the same ends. In states occupied by the Nazis in WW2 thugs who bashed up Jews or settled old inter-ethnic scores were serving the same ends as the puppet state (and German occupiers), but if they got into snatching handbags of old ladies whose sons were fighting on the Russian front that was probably overstepping any tacit boundaries. The issue is with framing these gangs as ‘criminal’. In a normal western society an outlaw gang may be easily defined as criminal, but in a fascist state where it is working within whatever bounds the higher authorities have set up, they may be formally criminal according to the legal code, but there is no way that the legal system will see them regularly being targeted, let alone prosecuted. They are agents of authoritarian power and enjoy protection within whatever framework that power allows them. If drugs are no biggie, or only affect people who aren’t liked, then drug dealing may be just fine. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2020, 11:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/7 "2020-04-09T11:16:50Z")
Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany had to operate under 1930s-40s technology. No computers. No CCTV. No tracking chips. For 90% of the population who is either complacent or simply only want to go about their day to day lives, controlling all the major institutions and infrastructure and undercover agents demanding “PAPERS PLEASE!” is sufficient. But these regimes still had to contend with partisans, spies and other resistance movements. They can’t see everything at once. Even in modern totalitarian regimes, unless you are going to literally check in on where every single person is all the time, there is still an opportunity for crime. What I think the OP is really asking is how, in fictional dystopias, the protagonist is allowed to basically run amok, building a resistance movement or otherwise defying the government. The answer is “depends” In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, Winston was largely left to his own devices because Big Brother suspected he was guilty of “thoughtcrimes” and they wanted to see who else he was connected with. V for Vendetta, I didn’t get a sense that their surveillance technology was any more or less sophisticated than modern Britain, which has a robust CCTV system but still has crime like any other country. The new Westworld is a bit ridiculous, as it as AI-based monitoring and predictive analytics so sophisticated that it plots out the life path for every single citizen, yet people can still rob ATMs. Not to mention you have a handful of “hosts” which would amount to a couple of people suddenly appearing out of nowhere with no credentials, no history, actually getting by in the real world. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2020, 11:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/8 "2020-04-09T11:40:39Z")
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Cops are people too, and without any oversight, they’ll feel even more free to take bribes or just ignore any crime they don’t feel like stopping. That was Orwell’s mistake. His perfectly-designed totalitarian nightmares were doomed, eventually, not thanks to any “human desire for freedom”, but rather due to human venality, laziness and incompetence. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2020, 12:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/9 "2020-04-09T12:00:42Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany had to operate under 1930s-40s technology. No computers. The Gestapo and SS, at least, used (1930s-1940s, no 700’s) IBM equipment for their data mining… > [@](#): > > The new Westworld is a bit ridiculous, as it as AI-based monitoring and predictive analytics so sophisticated that it plots out the life path for every single citizen, yet people can still rob ATMs. Not to mention you have a handful of “hosts” which would amount to a couple of people suddenly appearing out of nowhere with no credentials, no history, actually getting by in the real world. In Westworld, the AI also controls (much of) the crime. People in LA install an app on their smartphones which distributes criminal missions like GTA. “Hosts” (android replicants) and others can get false identities elaborately constructed by high-level crime syndicates, but it is indicated that the AI and corporate security can see through those to some extent, the AI definitely detecting “anomalies”. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2020, 12:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/10 "2020-04-09T12:59:34Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Cops are people too, and without any oversight, they’ll feel even more free to take bribes or just ignore any crime they don’t feel like stopping. > > That was Orwell’s mistake. His perfectly-designed totalitarian nightmares were doomed, eventually, not thanks to any “human desire for freedom”, but rather due to human venality, laziness and incompetence. I don’t know what “mistake” you’re seeing, Orwell was pretty explicit about crime in Oceania: > [@"1984"](#): > > They had put [Winston] into a cell similar to the one he was now in, but filthily dirty and at all times crowded by ten or fifteen people. The majority of them were common criminals, but there were a few political prisoners among them. He had sat silent against the wall, jostled by dirty bodies, too preoccupied by fear and the pain in his belly to take much interest in his surroundings, but still noticing the astonishing difference in demeanour between the Party prisoners and the others. The Party prisoners were always silent and terrified, but the ordinary criminals seemed to care nothing for anybody. They yelled insults at the guards, fought back fiercely when their belongings were impounded, wrote obscene words on the floor, ate smuggled food which they produced from mysterious hiding-places in their clothes, and even shouted down the telescreen when it tried to restore order. On the other hand some of them seemed to be on good terms with the guards, called them by nicknames, and tried to wheedle cigarettes through the spyhole in the door. The guards, too, treated the common criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle them roughly. There was much talk about the forced-labour camps to which most of the prisoners expected to be sent. It was ‘all right’ in the camps, he gathered, so long as you had good contacts and knew the ropes. There was bribery, favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol distilled from potatoes. The positions of trust were given only to the common criminals, especially the gangsters and the murderers, who formed a sort of aristocracy. All the dirty jobs were done by the politicals. > > There was a constant come-and-go of prisoners of every description: drug-peddlers, thieves, bandits, black-marketeers, drunks, prostitutes. There’s no point where Orwell says the IngSoc government will be overthrown by a desire for human freedom. Winston vaguely _believes_ it will at various points in the text (though clearly not so at the end), just as O’Brien confidently (and double-thinkedly, no doubt) _believes_ the Party will last forever and it is impossible that it won’t. Orwell, through _the book_ (i.e. _The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism_, ostensibly by Emmanuel Goldstein) in fact points out: > [@"1984"](#): > > All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or because they grew soft. Either they became stupid and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown; or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force, and once again were overthrown. They fell, that is to say, either through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is the achievement of the Party to have produced a system of thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes. This is in no way “perfectly designed” but it _is_ a structure that is likely to be more robust than a conventional dictatorship, at least theoretically. Frankly, from the narrative descriptions of how London is decaying, I personally figure the Party will inevitably lose the necessary infrastructure to maintain its totalitarian power. ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2020, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/11 "2020-04-09T13:03:03Z")
> [@jackdavinci](#): > > Plus, there is motivation to keep arresting a certain number of people just to keep the populace afraid. There is also motivation to create such strict laws that most people are violating it. If everyone is a criminal, the government has a valid reason to arrest anyone, anytime. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2020, 1:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/12 "2020-04-09T13:43:15Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > The new Westworld is a bit ridiculous, as it as AI-based monitoring and predictive analytics so sophisticated that it plots out the life path for every single citizen, yet people can still rob ATMs. Plus those committing the ATM robberies are coordinating their activity via a smartphone app, which is somehow invisible to the superintelligent AI that is monitoring everything. ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2020, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/13 "2020-04-09T13:45:10Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Cops are people too, and without any oversight, they’ll feel even more free to take bribes or just ignore any crime they don’t feel like stopping. > > That was Orwell’s mistake. His perfectly-designed totalitarian nightmares were doomed, eventually, not thanks to any “human desire for freedom”, but rather due to human venality, laziness and incompetence. Most of the planet is currently living in a totalitarian state with powers and controls which were unimaginable to most dystopian fiction writers. Thanks to COVID19. The result seems to be that the state apparatus is creaking under the weight of trying to maintain it and instead of jackbooted thugs have poor overworked bureaucrats begging us to "f_or the love of God, stay indoors, there is a pandemic"_ Alan Corens eassy, [Owing to circumstances beyond our control 1984 has been unavoidably detained](https://harpers.org/archive/1975/12/owing-to-circumstances-beyond-our-control-1984-has-been-unavoidably-detained/) was pretty damn accurate. So to the OP, pretty realistic. ---
**Author:** ![Darth\_Hamsandwich](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4bbf92/32.png) [@Darth\_Hamsandwich](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darth_Hamsandwich)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2020, 2:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/14 "2020-04-09T14:04:39Z")
My first thought, upon reading the OP, was _A Clockwork Orange_. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2020, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/15 "2020-04-09T15:29:31Z")
The PRC is the top surveillance state in the world right now. And corruption there is just as bad as it was 100 years ago. The state itself is always exempt from surveillance. _Quis custodiet ipsos custodes_? So the state is the _de facto_ criminal organization. Plus it is very large: have to have a lot of people to watch all this stuff. With so many crooks in positions of authority, it makes bribery not only easier, but basically a requirement. And once you have a buddy on your payroll inside the system, it makes you other extralegal activities safer to conduct. They don’t want any pesky law enforcement to get in the way of one of their revenue streams. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2020, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/16 "2020-04-09T17:10:25Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > Plus those committing the ATM robberies are coordinating their activity via a smartphone app, which is somehow invisible to the superintelligent AI that is monitoring everything. I’m expecting some kind of Asimovian “Zeroth Law” ripoff where the master AI allows a certain amount of crime because it has calculated that trying to prevent it would cause more problems, and that every action of every character, human and android, has been minutely predicted and the AI gives the illusion of choice as a means of control. Look carefully at the background for symbols that look like ∂_y_/∂_x_ because I’m pretty sure this whole thing is a matrix derivative. ---
**Author:** ![Mk\_VII](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Mk\_VII](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mk_VII)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2020, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/17 "2020-04-09T17:22:12Z")
> [@](#): > > _They had put [Winston] into a cell similar to the one he was now in, but filthily dirty and at all times crowded by ten or fifteen people. The majority of them were common criminals, but there were a few political prisoners among them. He had sat silent against the wall, jostled by dirty bodies, too preoccupied by fear and the pain in his belly to take much interest in his surroundings, but still noticing the astonishing difference in demeanour between the Party prisoners and the others. The Party prisoners were always silent and terrified, but the ordinary criminals seemed to care nothing for anybody. They yelled insults at the guards, fought back fiercely when their belongings were impounded, wrote obscene words on the floor, ate smuggled food which they produced from mysterious hiding-places in their clothes, and even shouted down the telescreen when it tried to restore order. On the other hand some of them seemed to be on good terms with the guards, called them by nicknames, and tried to wheedle cigarettes through the spyhole in the door. The guards, too, treated the common criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle them roughly. There was much talk about the forced-labour camps to which most of the prisoners expected to be sent. It was ‘all right’ in the camps, he gathered, so long as you had good contacts and knew the ropes. There was bribery, favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol distilled from potatoes. The positions of trust were given only to the common criminals, especially the gangsters and the murderers, who formed a sort of aristocracy. All the dirty jobs were done by the politicals._ A good deal of this passage seems to be founded on Orwell’s own account of getting himself jailed overnight for a petty drunkenness offence, just to see what it was like. There are some striking similarities, even down to the malfunctioning lavatory. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2020, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/18 "2020-04-09T17:22:37Z")
Authoritarian governments need a core of ordinary people to feel grateful for the strong coercive presence of government— to _protect_ them from the bad folks. They therefore benefit from some designated “thems” to keep everyone in a furor about. It can be Jews, criminals, homosexuals, immigrants & foreigners, infidels & pagans & atheists, mental & moral defectives, whatever. Criminals is a no-brainer of a great “them” to use because intolerant authoritarianism can appear to be a direct response, “law and order”. I have no difficulty whatsoever finding it credible that a technologically advanced authoritarian government would somehow be “unable” to end actual crime, especially if the crime tends to be conveniently concentrated in the impoverished and disenfranchised places that would be most likely to breed political dissent and least likely to contain the homes of the governing class. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2020, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dystopian-worlds-where-the-government-controls-everything-but-still-rampant-crime-unrealistic/851381/19 "2020-04-09T17:58:07Z")
I don’t recall much, if any, crime in V for Vendetta, excluding the anti-government crimes of the protagonists. Evie is attacked by a group of men walking home at night at the beginning, but they’re government agents enforcing a curfew, not just a random street gang.