He's not even trying to frame it as "the weight of crime will be lifted from the people so they can prosper". It's "citizens will be on their best behavior". I've got a suspicion that he envisions a separate world for himself that does not involve such monitoring.
'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that privilege.'
(Nineteen Eighty Four)
An excellent book. I spent the first part of my life thinking it mainly spoke to the past (we learned our lesson, right?), and that a Brave New World style future was more likely, but now I think it’s deeper than that. Totalitarianism shows up because of a flaw in the human psyche, and we need to be fucking CAREFUL.
“It's not just us keeping them apart. It's everyone in Beszel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We're only the last ditch: it's everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don't blink. That's why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn't work. So if you don't admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it's not your fault, for more than the shortest time ... you can't come back from that.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City