12/12/2010
Short answer: no. We no longer have personal sovereignty. What does this mean? It means we are free nowhere. Why does this matter? Well, some would argue that people need freedom to live authentic lives.
What do I mean by freedom? I mean the ability to feel that there is some space in the world to call our own and where we may be openly ourselves without risk of suspicion, intrusion, or fine. We don’t have that anymore.
Let’s look at some examples, kept deliberately general so as not to get caught up in pesky details and starting with where we live.
If you own your home, the government wants to get into your house, vendors want into your house, inspectors, regulators, and insurers want into your house, and they all want to tell you how to run it. There is, of course, a charge for these services — think taxes, premiums, fines, and fees. From how high your grass is to the quality of your heating system, someone has an interest in your home and how you live there.
If you rent, it’s worse, because now you have even more safety experts, bankers, insurers, inspectors, listers, and whatnot who have to come traipsing through your home, ticking things off on clip-boarded lists and suggesting changes that in the end, will cost both you and your landlord.
If you’re homeless, God help you. You have property owners, police, state and local agencies, merchants, tourists, residents, rodents, and each other to contend with, not to mention you’re cold, hungry, beaten down, and have nowhere to go or be. Fun!
And then there’s your working life. Let’s see, if you work for a company, you may be subject to background checks, medical examination, personality tests, distrust, credit checks, low pay, drug tests, home computer checks, computer surveillance, hidden camera surveillance, and other assurances that you will be a good employee and not cause trouble. Not too much freedom there, although you could argue that there is lots of safety-improving invasion of privacy!
If you own your own company, it’s not much better. The government at all levels, from feds to local officials, want to know everything about you, your staff, and your workplace (and charge you for providing them with the data, in many cases). You will have to file acres of paperwork in the proper format with the proper implement on the correct date with the right size check, or face very serious, unavoidable, expensive consequences. You do not have rights on these matters of government information and cash gathering. You will comply.
Well, heck, what about our personal lives, outside of our homes and workplaces. Surely there are some things that the government and corporations don’t care to control. Think again. Walking down the street or other public places, you’re filmed. Driving in your car, you’re surveilled and potentially scanned. Traveling on planes (and coming soon to all forms of public transportation if our pal Janet is to be believed), you’re surveilled, scanned naked, interrogated, sometimes detained, sometimes body searched, and sometimes marched through other more sinister detecting devices.
Ok, so stay home and surf the Internet — ha ha ha! I have to laugh. You’re surveilled and tracked and logged again! Look out for those iffy attachments and don’t visit questionable sites. Look out for email — that’s recorded too! Don’t let anyone know that you marched in that peace rally or downloaded that video or read WikiLeaks! Because that’s how they getcha.
It goes on and on — kids in school are routinely scanned, searched, surveilled, tested, inspected, graded, judged, and recorded, from kindergarten to senior year (all for their benefit of course). And that’s not to mention the mandatory this and that, as well as the Ritalin and other drugs brought in to make it possible for kids to tolerate the ungodly boring test-based curriculums.
If you’re old and infirm and have the misfortune to be in a nursing home or other institution, you’re the least free of all. Not only do all the detections, inspections, and surveillance tactics apply, there are other indignities to contend with. Perhaps there are abusive staff on night shift. If so, too bad for you. You’ll have a tough time convincing anyone to believe or help you. If the institution finds it convenient to drug you into a stupor with psychotropic drugs, they are free to administer as many as they like, when they like, regardless of the objections of your horrified family. And as for your money, you can kiss it goodbye. It’s commonly known that most nursing homes and other elder care facilities will take all the money you have left no matter what.
Sadly, I could go on, but you get the point. Plans hatched to improve public safety and protect those who need protecting have turned into systems of surveillance, intrusion, meddling, and cash extraction. Does this mean that the people who work for these systems, the regular people who implement and enforce them, are bad? Not necessarily. Most of them are just people doing a job, is all — a job that forces them to do things they may not even want to do, in many cases. But if we say anything about it, it’s curtains for us, so we don’t speak up. After all, we need the money to pay the man who makes us do the bad things….. And around and around we go.
Well, even if it were true that these control systems could save me from the nebulous harms and dangers I’m supposed to be afraid of, I’m still not sure I’d want them. Without a sense of being master of my own destiny, I feel as though I’m not really living anymore — rather, I’m a protected little vassal doing what I’m told for my own good. And since I no longer trust the motives of the rule-makers, I’m not even sure it is for my own good in every case. In most cases, I think the intrusions are for someone else’s good and to my own possible detriment.
Now I know that for almost every item I’ve listed as a problem, there are people who can and will explain, very rationally, why it has to be. Which is how we got in this predicament in the first place. But when you add up all the ways our society seeks to control our every move, it reveals a pattern of intrusion and control that makes daily life seem like a chapter out of 1984. It’s no longer a matter of an intrusion here, an indignity there, but of intrusion and indignity everywhere….
And so I go to great lengths to avoid situations where I’m subject to direct interaction with the powers that be, and try my best to stay under the radar as much as possible. Otherwise, I do my best to comply. After all, it’s pointless to rebel — isn’t it?
