This month’s article is from the “too scary to think about” file. One problem with this particular genre is that it leads most people into shutdown or mindless diversion mode just when what’s most necessary is to stay awake and pay attention. These days, it’s a thick file. Everything we hear about of any relevance tends to be so overwhelming that one’s nervous system goes into overload.
This is a fundamentally spiritual issue. I say this recognizing that most definitions of spiritual ignore politics and social justice issues, though what I mean is that how we respond to difficult situations has everything to do with one’s relationship to existence, and one’s relationship to truth. That is spiritual if anything is.
Recently we learned that federal agencies are still spying on our e-mail, phones, and credit card statements. Under the new, improved version of the New World Order, headed by a constitutional lawyer—Barack Obama—the administration went to the FISA court to get approval for its plans to, once again, spy on everyone and everything. Under the new, improved Internet, that meant direct access to the servers of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and 50 other services that we use all the time.
The story began with the revelation last week that Verizon was handing over phone records to the NSA. We were told that these were just the records of calls, not the content of the calls. On Thursday, I spoke with William Schaap, who was my editor at Covert Action Quarterly, and he explained that phone records are a lot more meaningful than they may seem on the surface.
He has had people from the NSA explain to him that just based on someone’s calling record, their whole life pattern can be discerned: What time they wake up, when they go to bed, who they talk to and for how long, how much alcohol they drink (repeated one-digit misdials are considered evidence of being drunk), and many other details even before there was GPS capability on telephones. The Internet and the ubiquitous use of credit cards has multiplied the government’s surveillance capacity.
Acts of Conscience
As sometimes happens these days, one person, a former NSA contractor named Edward Snowden, had documents exposing the behavior of the government and was willing to risk his life to come forward and tell us what was happening. Snowden was working under the NSA for a company owned by the Carlyle Group—the Bush family business. He didn’t have a formal education (his highest degree was a GED). He was one of those people who is a born “IT genius,” in the words of a close friend of his who I saw interviewed.
Snowden gave up his cushy $200,000-a-year job, a loving, hotter-than-hot girlfriend, and a life in Hawaii to exile himself in Hong Kong. He understands that he could be “rendered” by the CIA; that is, abducted and taken to a secret location and tortured, face life in solitary confinement, or even the death penalty. He did all of this to get the truth out and put it to the American people to decide what they want to do with this knowledge.
Snowden joins the ranks of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Tim DeChristopher as people willing to personally intervene not just with a protest or a statement but by exposing the truth or stopping injustice.
It’s interesting that some talking heads on the left and the right are defending the surveillance; some are calling Snowden crazy, a glory seeker, delusional, a liar, and a traitor—only occasionally referencing the possibility that what he did was an act of conscience. I have no reason to believe that he’s someone other than who he says he is. As John Steinbeck noted, the truth occasionally gets into the newspaper.
As far as I can tell, Snowden saw something happening that he knew was wrong, and was willing to give his life for his country. One common theme of both Manning’s trial and that of DeChristopher is that they were not allowed to use a defense that demonstrated that what they did was an act of conscience. It’s as if conscience itself is being prohibited—one’s individual right, privilege, and authority to distinguish right from wrong, and act on that determination.
If we’re not supposed to be surprised that the surveillance is happening, the American government should not be so surprised that people have been willing to give their lives to stop it, given the hundreds of thousands of patriotic people who have been willing to risk life, limb, irradiation, brain trauma, and psychological damage by going to Afghanistan and Iraq.
I would note that the wars, the Patriot Act, and the massive expansion of the national security state were all the result of 9/11, still regarded as sacrosanct as a purported miracle. What we know for sure is that trillions of dollars have been handed over to military suppliers such as Halliburton and Carlyle Group, and their countless contractors and subcontractors, all to pay for the resulting “defense” and “security” related activities. When someone blows the whistle on the NSA spying on the public, it’s not somebody’s honor, career, reputation, or even criminal liability that’s the threat. Rather, it’s that ocean of money.
Intrusion as Love
We might ask why there is so much emphasis on spying on individual people. The ruse, of course, is that it “prevents terrorism.” Many people actually believe that they are safer for having their life pried into, a belief that begs for psychological analysis. The docility with which this is tacitly permitted, or ignored, all in the name of safety, describes issues on the parts of the spies and those spied on that need to be addressed in therapy but rarely are. I’ve said many times—referencing political theorists of the 1960s and 1970s—that the personal is political; that there is no private life that is not influenced or even determined by some larger public life.
The history of modern psychology includes discussions connecting the government to what Wilhelm Reich called the “authoritarian mini-state,” the family. We are nearly all raised in a family system where everything is known about us and where we get to know very little about our environment. People know things about us to which we’re not even privy. As a child, one cannot see one’s own school records, and now as adults, we’re even told we cannot see our own medical records. The FBI keeps records on many people and we don’t get to see them—unless we take the risk of requesting them and calling attention to ourselves.
These experiences prepare us for life in society, a life that is fundamentally abusive and invasive. When people become mature adults and claim their personal space and their autonomy, this involves the overthrow of family tyranny and coming to terms with the tyranny of corporate authority, though this is rare. Most of the time, we remain subject to strict parenting in the form of being policed by official authorities or marrying someone who takes the place of our parents. These authorities have what you might call boundary issues—they know no limits. The child internalizes the behaviors of the dominant authority figure as guilt and shame. This leads to problems with intimacy and isolation later in life.
The child also learns to see the intrusion as an expression of love and concern from the authority figures. To compensate, the child projects the feelings of shame and guilt onto others—then engages in intrusive behaviors to show love. This is the root of “If you’re not jealous, you don’t really love me.” In some situations, the problems with intimacy, shame and intrusion become so extreme that the person suffering from them “needs” an emotionally external object on which to displace these conflicts—something like the state and the public.
Victims of the worst abuse often become the worst abusers, acting out their authority issues as taking power over others or an entire population. Most of the people they act out on themselves have unresolved pain from family intrusion, and the process cycles to the spot where it is now. In this kind of compromised environment, particularly one that’s been weakened further by extremes of fear (lately of domestic terrorists, school shooters, Muslims, and of government intrusion), government surveillance can proliferate and few will object. And the person who calls it out can seem crazy to many who have not questioned any of this.
Carl Jung said that the role of the father was to limit and block impulses—sexual and otherwise. The father’s role in Jung’s view is to set up a situation where the only thing that’s to be trusted is imposed from outside. Given that so much of what is communicated privately on the Internet is sexual in nature, the presence of the government can be seen as an overwhelming external limit placed on what is appropriate to say, feel, or do. Because most people feel guilty about sexual pleasure, the limiting presence feels like it belongs there—it’s an extension of their own desire to limit their impulses, conveniently imposed from outside.
What we are seeing with the NSA eavesdropping is not merely the result of technology, though technology is often what sets the limit on what can happen (of which there is apparently none today). Neither is it the result of an authentic need for a benevolent authority to guard the perimeter. Even crows have lookouts stationed around fields, and deer warn one another of an invasive presence in a forest. Everyone understands that there is some legitimate need for the government to watch the boundaries and be alert to invasion and betrayal. The problem we are facing is when a legitimate need is confused with a totally illegitimate abuse of power.
In a column in the Guardian from last November, Naomi Wolf describes a British reality show called “Cheaters.” Its premise: Someone suspects they are being cheated on by their spouse or partner. They report their “case” to the show and if accepted, the program pays for a private eye and makes a spectacle of the bust. Wolf comments: “You could not dream up a piece of pop culture better designed to normalize the surveillance society. What is alarming is how directly the series models a blurring, or mission creep, from television surveillance into inviting ordinary citizens to accept and even embrace the role of surveillance and spying in their daily private lives.” Most people don’t have the budget to hire a private investigator and have to suffice with DIY prying into e-mail accounts, and their chat history, installing cameras in someone’s private space, or relying on reports from lookout crows who keep an eye on things around town. You can buy apps that retrieve deleted chats from someone’s phone.
No matter how “normalized” or “commonplace” it may be, living in an environment of ubiquitous surveillance, it’s still a sign of cultural and individual sickness. And it’s never, ever for a friendly purpose. All of the most repressive regimes in history start their projects by regulating the most private affairs of people, keeping files on individuals, and fomenting mistrust. When you don’t know who might turn on you, everyone is a potential enemy—and in that situation, it’s easy for the corporate state to rule everything. Under this plan, it becomes the only place you have to turn for comfort, cold though it may be.
Meanwhile, as you watch this story go by, notice how you feel about your relationship to your parents and early caregivers. As you watch pundits and politicians spout their ideas, I suggest you ask whether they’ve addressed their family baggage and therefore whether they have even the faintest hope of clarity on this issue and everything that it represents. Think of it as a vast family drama—where father supposedly knows best.
This article appears in July 2013.
