Civil society depends on internal self-sanction, not external surveillance, for order

Evidence

Despite the centrality of self-sanctions in the regulation of behavior, they typically are unacknowledged or never measured in psychosocial and economic theories. Regardless of whether individuals are “good” or “bad,” they have to live with themselves, with the choices they make, and how they behave in their daily lives. A civil society cannot be run on fear control alone. It requires massive social surveillance and an extensive system of punitive sanctions to stifle noncompliance. A civil society is largely a self-governing one. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 70

Categorization

• XREF: This is what moral-disengagement shortcuts matter: if self-sanctions do the heavy governing, then any mechanism that disabled them would collapse civil restraint — directly relevant to how ordinary citizens can support harmful Islamophobic or racist policy. — connects to: Control societies govern by indefinite postponement and internalized policing — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 48
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that civil order rests on unmeasured internal sanctions — and therefore on whatever disengages those sanctions — makes the entire moral disengagement mechanism load-bearing for understanding how societies produce harm without collapsing.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 70