Singapore pays its citizens to read. Cameroon, in its own recent history, has paid nothing to cultivate its citizens' minds and quite a lot to make sure some of those minds stopped talking to each other.

In January 2017, the government shut down the internet across the Anglophone Northwest and Southwest regions. It stayed off for ninety three days. It came back for a few months and then went dark again from October 2017 into 2018.

Estimates of the economic cost vary by source, but they run from several hundred thousand dollars to tens of millions, on top of the less measurable cost of teachers, lawyers, students and small businesses cut off from the rest of the country and the world. Set that image next to Singapore's library shelves and the contrast writes itself.

But the more interesting question is not which state treats its citizens better. It is which philosophy of the state each is actually practicing, and whether either government believes in its own philosophy at all.

The first is communitarian. Sandel's version, which draws on a much older Aristotelian intuition, holds that we are not free floating individuals who happen to live near each other. We are constituted by our communities. Our good is bound up with the common good, and a state that ignores this, that treats citizens as isolated consumers to be left alone, is not being neutral, it is abandoning them.

On this view, a government has not only the right but the obligation to shape the conditions under which its citizens can flourish, education, public health, yes, even reading campaigns, because the alternative is letting the market and the algorithm decide what its people become.

The second is libertarian, and its clearest statement is still John Stuart Mill's harm principle from ‘On Liberty’. The only reason power can rightfully be exercised over a person against their will, Mill argued, is to prevent harm to others. Your own good, physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. On this view the state has no business telling you to read, to exercise, to buckle your seatbelt, or to do anything else for your own sake. It is your body, your mind, your life. The seatbelt example is worth sitting with, because it exposes the tension cleanly.

If the state should never intervene for your own good, then mandatory seatbelts are already an overreach, since the person most harmed by not wearing one is usually the person who chose not to wear it. That is a coherent position. It is also a position almost no functioning state actually holds, because in the end we do not live as isolated individuals negotiating private risk.

We live inside a state, subscribe to its rules, and accept that some of those rules exist to protect us from ourselves, because the costs of our choices rarely stay as private as we imagine.

So which of these is Cameroon practicing? On the evidence, neither, consistently. Where communitarianism would demand intervention, funded libraries, digital literacy programs, healthcare infrastructure, the protections a state owes citizens it claims to be building a common good with, Cameroon is often absent.

It has policies on paper meant to protect and improve citizens' lives that go hardly implemented. That absence looks, on the surface, almost libertarian, a state that simply lets its people be.

But watch what happens the moment citizens start organizing, dissenting, or embarrassing the government in a language the world can read.

The same state that will not fund a library will shut down an entire region's internet access in days. The same state that has no reading campaign has, historically, moved with impressive speed and coordination when the goal was silencing lawyers, teachers and students rather than informing them.

That is the tell. This is not libertarianism, and it is not communitarianism either. It is a state invoking whichever philosophy happens to serve its own convenience in the moment. Absent and hands off when the ask is to protect or improve its people, because that costs money and accountability.

Present and heavy handed when the ask is to preserve its own power, because that costs only the willingness to cut a cable. Mill's harm principle, taken seriously, would actually condemn the internet shutdowns rather than excuse them, since dissenting speech in Bamenda or Buea harms no one in the sense Mill meant.

It only threatens the comfort of the people in charge. A government that reached for libertarian language to justify staying out of its citizens' education while reaching for authoritarian tools to stay in control of its citizens' speech is not choosing a philosophy. It is choosing an excuse, twice, in opposite directions, and hoping no one notices the seam.

A state that will not pay you to read but will happily pay to keep you from speaking is not practicing liberty. It is practicing control, with slightly better public relations.