Yes, and it generally isn’t because of laws, there’s just a lot of sensible social customs (don’t walk while eating on the street because it encourages litter, etc) and others will remind you of those customs if you break them. And unlike the US, if you break those unwritten rules and then start a fight for “content” when confronted (assault is illegal), police will actually put you in jail or deport you instead of looking the other way.
It’s not authoritarian to have a sensible set of laws that you enforce rigorously, backed by soft norms that are only enforced through social customs. Yet in the US we seem to want the inversion of this, legal enforcement of social norms with weak enforcement of hard laws. Very strange.
It’s not authoritarian to have a sensible set of laws that you enforce rigorously, backed by soft norms that are only enforced through social customs. Yet in the US we seem to want the inversion of this, legal enforcement of social norms with weak enforcement of hard laws. Very strange.