China's new person-rating system will track everything everyone does, and rate each person in China for loyalty to the state, based on monitoring all kinds of actions and communications.

Even talking to a person with a low rating will lower other people's ratings. So people with low ratings will be shunned, perhaps unemployed.

In a society like that, talented people who don't want to be heroic martyrs, and don't see a way to escape, but who cannot bear becoming active supporters of totalitarianism, will have to show no views and no talent, and reject any trace of ambition that would tempt them to aim for a higher rating so they can get ahead.

They won't have much chance to do good, but at least this way they will do the least possible evil.

"Free" country governments, with their ever-increasing surveillance, are moving indirectly and quietly towards the same horror.