“Equally critical is that the measure of how free a society is is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens, but how it treats its dissidents and those who resist orthodoxy. Equally essential to what it means to be a free and fulfilled human being is to have a place that we can go and be free of the judgmental eyes of other people. Theres a reason why we seek that out, and our reason is that all of us — not just terrorists and criminals, all of us — have things to hide.” “Human shame is a very powerful motivator, as is the desire to avoid it, and thats the reason why people, when theyre in a state of being watched, make decisions not that are the byproduct of their own agency but that are about the expectations that others have of them or the mandates of societal orthodoxy.” What all of these seemingly disparate works recognize, the conclusion that they all reach, is that a society in which people can be monitored at all times is a society that breeds conformity and obedience and submission, which is why every tyrant, the most overt to the most subtle, craves that system.” “Here is how Orwells narrator, Winston Smith, described the surveillance system that they faced: There was, of course, no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. He went on to say, At any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live, did live, from habit that became instinct, in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard and except in darkness every movement scrutinized.”
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 05:49:10 +0000
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