Although this is by no means a consensus view on the human spirit. Culture and civilization are in many ways simply what you describe, means of domesticating the human animal. It's quite loaded to assume everyone who isn't on board with the Taxi Driver view of the human spirit is 'bad'.
Another user points to the Panopticon which wasn't viewed as evil or 'dystopian'. It was thought of as a humane, progressive reform of prisons that does away with the violence and privation you had in prisons up until that time. In a lot of Confucian cultures that remains today, you don't find a lot of Koreans, Japanese or Chinese people who think law enforcement and surveillance is crushing the human spirit, they'd tell you these are tools to cultivate civilized human beings so you don't end up like monkeys in the banana factory.