>You don’t need to control an individual.

People who lived in Warsaw pact countries where you could only buy meat with a "ticket" would disagree with this. There is a very real desire in the ruling class to be this invasive.

There's a little dichotomy here. If you try to control the population as a whole "head-on" you'd get decent backlash, especially in countries where such moves have been rejected.[Anecdotally i can speak only for EE] However if you try to convince the masses at an individual level, (i.e a bottom-> top approach) you can have more success, assuming you do this in a paced manner and not rush the tyranny (because that would be obvious). Nowadays the latter approach 'works' because most people have low attention span and such grifts go mostly unnoticed, or at least enforced with pretexts like security, protect the kids, etc.

The gov. vs the individual is an uneven fight. The same cannot be said about the gov. vs the people.

well met, nothing you just wrote addresses what OP asked.