Every totalitarian regime needs its police and priests. Iran has the revolutionary guard, USSR had the NKVD, East Germany had the Stasi, Covid had busybodies and Public Health, the Left has SJWs, and so on.
Authoritarian force has its disadvantages though, especially when you're trying to convey legitimacy. Extorting businesses because they won't fly a gay flag invites a lot of latent resentment. What if you could stifle rebellion before it even began to form? Preventative medicine is better after all.
HR is a feature of every developed state. I cannot think of a workplace now that doesn't have one outside of small businesses. They serve an important role in keeping people "in line", but they have no authority empowerment to even do so. They can't detain you, or spy on you, or take away your children. But what they do is more effective.
HR turns every other co-worker into a hotmic and every conversation into an interrogation. Every glance from a coworker is a camera lens snapping. All honesty dies. This paranoia I think is a better policing tool than any black-clad strong men breaking into your apartment in the middle of the night. The psychology of anticipating being caught is worse than being caught itself. Many witnesses admitted they had a sensation of relief after being arrested by secret police because finally the damned game was over and they could accept it.
HR is the secularist guard. If people have no shared beliefs, then the state can at least force an era of non-expression. It's stable, even peaceful, arguably. But corpses are just as reliable in that regard. That is the unsettling part about "HR art", it's spiritually dead because it has nothing to say, and dead men tell no tales.
