Just as there are more than one way to skin a cat, many are the ways in which to build a totalitarian state. The ancient Sumerians and the Inca used the household responsibility system, in which a small number of families were responsible for the crimes of all members of the households. The Soviet Union and its satellite states relied on mass surveillance and terror to control the population, while Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran rely on a religious police and Islamic courts to enforce public morality.
The Voluntary Mass Surveillance Society
We western men and women have stumbled on a new version of totalitarian control, the voluntary mass surveillance society. In this new and exciting world, anyone can become a morality police enforcer. If you hear an offending comment, you can use your social media account to ruin the reputation of strangers.
Our beloved Lena Dunham recently showed how freelance morality policing works. Miss Dunham allegedly overheard a conversation between two female American Airlines flight attendants, who were discussing the recent trend of ‘transgender kids’. The two stewardesses, in Miss Dunham’s telling, then proceeded to say they’d never accept a trans kid.
A common man or woman may have chosen to ignore the conversation—a school of thought claims that other people’s conversations are none of our businesses. A garden-variety busybody may have interrupted them and tried to shame them. But not Lena, our heroine. She decided to contact American Airlines to get the stewardesses fired, and possibly their reputations ruined.
Lena, bless her heart, failed to get her way. American Airlines couldn’t find the offending stewardesses, and its Twitter account even sounded dismissive of her claims. But under different circumstances, such denounce-and-shame tactics have succeeded.
Voluntary Surveillance in Action
Poor Justine landed. Justine Sacco, a public relations specialist from New York, made a poorly worded joke. Justine, white as Shaun King’s secret DNA test, made a poorly-worded joke that sounded racist to illiterate people. She was trying to sound woke, but it didn’t matter to the online mob. The swarm got her fired from her job, and made her future job prospects difficult. Miss Sacco even claimed she found it difficult to date in the immediate aftermath of the storm.
Then there’s the James Damore case. The former Google engineer thought he was posting to a private forum when he wrote his now-infamous memo. Presumably, another Google employee, outraged by his memo, decided to leak it to the press. The media storm that followed permanently misrepresented Mr. Damore’s views, and, it seems to me, damaged his reputation beyond repair. I doubt he could be hired by another high-flying tech company. He will be a ‘lighting rod’ of controversy for the rest of his life.
These cases, and many others, don’t seem like much on their own. But the aggregate result of voluntary totalitarian denouncing should worry us all. The potential punishment for a trivial ‘crime’ is too steep. People will be afraid—are already afraid—to speak their minds. When decades of hard work can be derailed by a busybody, self-censorship seems like a small price to pay to make your sacrifices worth it. Little by little, we shamefully cave.
A Society of Fear
We lose much when we fear expressing ourselves. Social trust dissolves when we fear every acquaintance could throw us to the mob. I lived under such a regime—Socialist Cuba for the first 18 years of my life—and I don’t relish reliving the experience.
I wish I had a solution for this problem. The peddlers of social fear control the commanding heights of the culture. Hollywood, elite universities, the media, even the boards of high-tech companies, they control them all. All we have is truth and decency on our side. I wish I could tell you that will be enough, but I don’t want to lie to you. Whatever justice we are to find in this fallen world of ours, we will have to craft it.
