Monday, February 8, 2010

The Nature of Privacy*

My notions of privacy were formed from an early age, imposed in great part by a mother who is excruciatingly private in most ways, as she learned from her father, who didn't talk about his own experiences (as a sixteen-year-old who joined the navy to enter WWI by lying about his age, who won the Croix de Guerre for heroic actions in France)----even to his own brother. As a teenager, I strongly related to what I read of Henry David Thoreau's isolation at Walden Pond and to the ideas that Carlos Castanada presented as Don Juan's, especially in regard to not telling anyone else your "personal history," for that would allow someone else to trap you in their own ideas of who you are.

Thus, I still have very conflicting ideas about whether to reveal my ever-changing self----and at what point. That is, I used to think that I'd eventually reach a point where I'd honed this self to an acceptable sharpness, brightness, that would be "worthy" of revealing to a larger world. Then I realized that my life was passing and I was merely hiding, waiting for a perfection that I could never attain, and that I was missing many opportunities of interacting with delightful people who generously accept me as I am . . . becoming.

And that's it. I intend never merely to be what I am now, but to continue always to become what I want to be (regardless of the social "acceptability"). Those folk who prefer to box you up, tie the strings tightly, and tape up your mouth, keep you conveniently on the shelf and expect you to behave just so----they don't interest me, but I must admit that when I examine my feelings about such people, I fear them. They are the ones who judge, who imprison, who hurt, the ones who try to make us feel we are always being watched from the infamous Panopticon.

And this is the crux of what I feel about privacy at present: it is the keeper of individuality, of differences, especially since I now live in a very small town, one with cliques very much like those that develop in one's school years. In revealing too many of our idiosyncrasies to the world at large (through this vast technology), I wonder whether we endanger them. Zombies are out there looking for life to consume; the impulse to remain hidden still seems viable.

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