For the most part, privacy concerns operate as superstitions.

They have to, because the harm involved is such an ephemeral thing. They exist in a very abstract area of the mind that it is nearly impossible to apprehend rationally.

It is hard to make a solidly rational argument about something that doesn’t hurt you and probably never will.

I mean, say the government wanted to put security cameras in every room in every house everywhere. It would mean the annihilation of the very concept of privacy from the point of view of the relationship between citizens and their government.

We would be horrified at the very thought of it. Someone seeing our most private and intimate moments? Intolerable.

And yet, if the government somehow pulled it off despite the public outcry, you would soon get used to it. Sure, in theory, you have no privacy at all any more. But most people would never be otherwise effected about it at all.

The cameras would be there, but you’d forget about them soon enough. Most people don’t actually break the law in their own homes, so the police would never come busting through the door of your average family dwelling. Most people would never hear a peep from the government at all.

Why is this? Because our social privacy remains intact.

Sure, maybe some government employee somewhere sees what goes on in your bedroom (and your bathroom, ick) but you don’t know them, will never hear from them, and it will never impact your life in any way.^[1]

So what, exactly, have you lost? The concept creeps pretty much anyone out, but it’s hard to argue why.

Hence, superstition. We get a profound sense of unease and possibly even terror at the thought of such an invasion of our personal domain, but the facts supporting it are nebulous at best.

The only way to make a logical argument is to start from the position that human beings, however rational or irrational it may be, have a strong instinct towards privacy.

This is easily demonstrated via cross-cultural analysis. There are two things that, regardless of all other variables, human beings simply do not do in public : mate, and defecate.

There is no culture on Earth where people routinely have sex in the street, just like there is no culture on Earth where people do not seek privacy for acts of elimination. The exact operation of these deep taboos varies from culture to culture, but just as there is no society that does not have marriage, there are no societies without these taboos.

So clearly our privacy concerns stem from something far deeper than reasoned argument or pragmatic concern. We want it because we are driven by deep instinct, the same kind of instinct that makes us want sex, status, and freedom.

We don’t physically need any of those. But any conception of human happiness that doesn’t take those into account is laughable.

And so it goes with privacy. Regardless of actual consequences, we will react very strongly to any invasion of our privacy. The development of our modern conception of privacy, where our homes are the place where we can escape the larger social structure and “be ourselves”, and where in our bedrooms and bathrooms we can even safely violate our nudity, sexuality, and toilet taboos in rooms we have all agreed are the proper place for those activities.

But these taboos are part of our social instincts. As such, they are dependent on social context. That’s why the full surveillance program I described above would fade into the background of most people’s lives. Without someone to, in essence, point and laugh at us, or react in horror and shock, our shame is not activated and therefore our privacy instinct isn’t either.

When we are speaking strictly of privacy from our government, things get a lot trickier.

Because all we have to deal with that kind of privacy concern is instinct and superstition, the people arguing against any expansion of government powers will always come across as irrational and paranoid. The argument that if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear, will come up and it is a powerful one.

And it’s not always wrong, either. One only has to imagine turning that thinking on the powers that be to understand that.

A lot of people worry that any expansion of surveillance will lead to an Orwellian nightmare society. This is a very common and strong response, but it is not actually rational. It is, instead, a veneer of reason concealing a superstitious fear.

At the core of this fear is a misunderstanding (or outright ignorance) of what it is that protects your privacy right now.

Sure, most of us get that we have rights and those rights protect us from the government on some level or other. This is true, but it is only a small part of the picture.

What truly keeps your privacy intact is the moral principle of reciprocity. We all, deep down inside, understand that we don’t peek into other people’s windows because we wouldn’t want our own peeked into. When we imagine doing wrong, we imagine it being done to us, and thus we are stopped.

In short, what really protects our privacy, and everything else we hold dear, is the moral character of our neighbors.

This not a concept readily accepted by the citizens of a modern individualist society. Individualism breeds suspicion of others by isolating citizens from connection to what their collective does (none of us had to get together to build that road, we just had to pay for it), and so the notion that it is not law or ourselves who create society but the collective moral nature of all our fellow citizens does not seem sufficient to us.

It is nevertheless true.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.