It’s disturbing.
Fundamental to the concept of civility is that we recognize the difference between private and secret. That is, we keep from others only what is private — stuff that, best you can tell, does not affect them and is none of their business. We already have way too much crap coming at us, so elimination of somebody else’s private stuff is good and right. It’s also morally righteous.
But paranoia is not a gift of the Spirit. The presumption that others must justify any information request is not morally righteous. A critical element in civility is trust and people need to know something about you to trust you. There has to be a measured exchange of privacy in order to include people in your orbit and you in theirs. So we build rules and customs to define what is and is not appropriate to share. Despite my fundamental rejection of Western Civilization, I still am forced to live in it and I let a lot of my moral objections slide because I have to start somewhere with folks who don’t know me. Thus, I remain aware of the necessary elements of trust from a Western social perspective, along with an awareness of how it has radically degraded in recent decades.
Quantum Morality means operating on multiple levels and knowing when divine justice means we play along with the context and when to fight it, and how much and on what particular issues we fight or don’t fight.
So we see a trend where some particular institution or organization drifts from at least a pretense of openness (which correlates to accountability) to paranoid control. The more people involved, the more such control requires emotional abuse of the membership. It demands a sharp awareness of leverage and control, and how far you can push to keep your victims passive and unresistant. It means turning their world into a hellish nightmare, in part by convincing them it’s only worse outside the gates.
So I read the allegations about several religious institutions that have drifted toward autocracy and internal paranoia. And it’s just like most governments and other forms of human organization. But who would have thought Google, of all things? I would have thought it, because I’m cynical. Don’t make the mistake of thinking I love libertarian theory, or that I am such a big fan of AntiWar.com. I read the site some, but I am not enlisted in their particular mix of causes, and certainly not their fundamental philosophy (it’s entirely Western).
BTW, let me plug once again the duck as a far better option for your own personal sanity when you need a search engine. And I’ll let you know that recently Mozilla (responsible for Firefox browser, one of my favorites) defaults to Yahoo instead of Google now. Google has the gall to press Firefox users to dump Yahoo. And frankly, Yahoo is making a bit of a comeback, in part because people are starting to smell the moral stink that now clings to Google, whatever one might think of Yahoo.
The instinct to play gatekeeper and control others by any means at all does not come from God. We who find ourselves in shepherd’s call are eager to make sheep less sheep-like. That’s what this blog and my books are about, and it’s why the books are free. It’s why I publish through Smashwords, because they are the least encumbered outfit I can find. So my books don’t make Amazon because Amazon demands full control, but you find my stuff through most other major distribution services. This is not about organizing boycotts or exercising market leverage; I really want you to stand free and strong. How can I not offer you the same mercy that was given to me?
I want you to find it disturbing when someone demands you wear their blindfold.
