A bit of history would do you wonders. Top-down control was the norm*. If it has changed, it’s less now.
* For 95% of the peasant/slave population
Sure, there were lords who claimed large parts of the population as their property. But they often didn't even have a complete list of the people they supposedly "controlled", nor did they have any insight or actual control over their private lives in the sense that modern nation-states do. Legal codes used to contain a few dozen criminal offenses in total – today, there are tens of thousands.
Invasive, pervasive, centralized, highly organized, and sophisticated top-down control of individuals is an entirely new phenomenon that is only made possible by cutting-edge technology in the first place. If you imagine past societies as forerunners to modern police states, you have a very distorted picture of history. Many of them did not even have anything like police to begin with.
Whether we can build a large shed in our gardens is managed through a vast and intricate bureaucracy. A ridiculously precise and unwieldy apparatus is indeed watching our every move. I completely agree that is a new phenomenom, made possible by technology. I cannot just take down a tree without permission, even in my own yard. How weird is that. Yet does it matter?
Do you have to work the fields just because your family failed to produce a consul in the past century or two? Are you destined for a life of abject slavery because you disagreed with the regional governor about some administrative issue? Peoples of the past may have lacked technology, but that doesn't result in freedom. You don't need penal codes if your every move is watched and judged by your peers. Each of them happy to turn you in for a small fee.
More importantly, legal codes aren't necessary if you drop the pretence and just wield power however you want, whenever you want. You don't need detailed control of peasants' private hobbies if you got overpowering total dominion over the fate of an entire continent.
I'm just saying that oppression is nothing new and I actually think we are at an all-time low in actual, life-dominating oppressive powers. In some cases I can make the case that's actually not so great, because these days I'm increasingly more afraid of my fellow men than any "government" - which in my country is barely hanging on and always behind, but I don't know about the US.
Can't we do both? Appreciate the progress we made, "we don't have it as bad as the last guy", and also looking towards improving even that? Wholesale dismissal of the entire edifice is IMO not the way though.
