The Future Of Personal Privacy And Security

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INTRODUCTION

[Please note that this is something of a crossover article between my 'zunipus' blog and my Mac-Security blog. Because it is pertinent to personal privacy and security, I decided to place the article here. It goes abstract. But it is my hope that you will also find it to be specific to how you think about personal privacy and security.]

FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) is a propaganda tool used to control human beings. It uses language, communication, to attack our sense of security in order to herd us as cattle into the desired direction of the propagandist. In our current Age of Marketing, the herding of human beings has become something of a science.

All of us have our own personal little world running inside our heads. I call it our 'Inner World', as opposed to what actually goes on around us, our 'Outer World'. We know that inner worlds can be insane beyond the comprehension of anyone out here in the outer world. I recall the moment I realized a friend of mine was insistently serious in his assertion that he was 'Jesus Christ' and that I was one of his new 12 disciples. I began shaking uncontrollably. The disconnect between his inner world, the outer world and my own inner world was so profound and incomprehensible to me that my sense of safety broke down and I exhibited physiological symptoms of shock.

What is a suicide bomber? How can a human being be so disconnected from our outer world that they murder themselves and everyone else they can take with them for the sake of a personal 'truth' they hold that insists they perform this ultimate, final act of local destruction. I have never been able to fathom why we humans are DRIVEN to self-destructive acts. Think on a broader scale beyond one suicide bomber to our entire world economic system that is DRIVEN to destroy itself here and now. How does this happen? How is a kind, compassionate and sane human being supposed to rationalize what amounts to massive herd insanity?

One of the best tools in psychology for understanding some basic ways in which we humans think inside our inner worlds is the Maslow Hierarchy Of Needs. It is commonly pictured as a triangle of needs factors starting at a broad base of physiological human needs, shrinking in importance on up to a point where our self-actualization needs reside. As you can imagine, a propagandist who wants to control our behavior attempts to throw us entirely out of the realm of self-actualization because that is where we are the most rational and activated to affect the world around us with our personal skills and insights. Instead the propagandist wants to reduce us to dumb animals who are running away from cattle prods provided by way of FUD and other propaganda tools.

The USA is unique in that its government puts in writing and enacts in law and law enforcement the rights of all of us to seek and establish self-actualization. It is not merely a government convenience or option. It is a full and eternal right. To restate it in my own personal terms, the USA acknowledges and enforces what I consider to be "god's" great gift to use as living beings: The Right Of Choice. From that right and ability springs everything important about our lives. Because of that greatest of gifts, we are able to learn and grow into something more than simply human cattle. We can ascend to wisdom, insight, responsibility and greatest of all, spirit.

Take a moment to consider what resonates in your inner world regarding choice and personal growth. Consider the remarkable miracle of our sole planet in the universe, that we know of, that brought forth, developed and enhanced this extraordinary system we call life. We live on the miracle planet, Earth our only home. Consider the gift of being cosmos dust that got to wake up, look around, learn and grow into that remarkable creation we call spirit. Amidst all of this, how can we help but pursue and find our personal happiness? Think of the splendor and joy of sharing our lives of growth with fellow kind, compassionate and sane human beings. This is what wraps around the best of ourselves as homo sapiens, the wisest animal.

Then there's this: Maintaining our hierarchy of needs amidst the masses of self-destructive people who strive to take as many victims with them as possible. Don't be fooled into thinking along the primitive concepts of good versus evil, thinking in 1-dimensional terms. It's thinking along one single straight line with no added dimensions. It limits us to blindly thinking only of left and right with everything else being some variation in between. It limits us to ignorance. We live in a 3-dimensional world of 3-dimensional people thinking in 3-dimensional ways. What is good and what is evil comes down to how we view this wide world of human thought from the limited perspective our own inner world. There is so much more going on than we can possibly comprehend. We want to believe there are simple good guys and bad guys in the world, adhering to the simplest concepts we can imagine just to get through the complexity of it all. But simplicity is nothing more than ignorance. As I am ever saying:

We never know everything about anything.

We want a formula for living. We want physics that just work the same way every time with no possible variations due to unseen factors. We want simple. We want ignorant. But by doing so we kill that great gift we're given: Choice. We run away from choice and hide in 1-dimensional thinking.

A fun illustration, from the lyrics to the Devo song 'Freedom of Choice':

Freedom of choice
Is what you got.
Freedom from choice
Is what you want.
(Freedom Of Choice lyrics � EMI Music Publishing)

Sorting through this basic problem of ours, wanting simplicity in a complex world, is a terrific source of stress. We keep wanting to climb down the Maslow Hierarchy Of Needs so we can minimize the stress and just relax and vegetate.

And doesn't the propagandist, who wants to herd us all, find our desire for simplicity to be so incredibly helpful to his cause! It's as if we want to be reduced to cattle. Give us a push with a bit of FUD and we're stampeding into the abattoir. Here come the rotating knives.

What a dilemma.

For me the solution has been to take all the negative being shoved my way by both myself and all those other people pushing their simplistic negative inner worlds at me and push back with my own positivity. I call it 'Positive Push'. I consider it an offensive act. I offensively push my calm sense of what is good about being alive onto other people.

Here is what I find: Positivity from others is soooo welcome. We drop our security walls and let the positive in. It is the welcoming of a sense of security with others so we can joyfully climb back up our own personal Hierarchy Of Needs. This is where we enjoy having others around us and where we experience what I consider to be the ecstasy of being alive as a human being. There we are living our lives of choice to the fullest.

Take a moment to consider how sharing positivity with others resonates in your inner world.

I wanted to write this introduction in order to establish a useful perspective before considering aspects of the future of 'The Lost', as I call everyone who can't get a handle on positivity in their lives. These are the self-destructives with no concept of everyone else's right to choice. They choose and demand that everyone else take the ramifications of that choice along with them. The worst of these people would 'murder the world' to fit their own personal insane inner world vision. They are the psychopaths, they are severely damaged by personal experience, they are the ill and the deceived. They are lost and they loathe themselves. They act out their self-loathing through their behavior toward the rest of us. They hate themselves, they hate everyone, they want to destroy themselves, they want to destroy the rest of us.

There is a great film, based on the Shakespeare play 'The Tempest', that beautifully illustrates these situation, pointing out that each of us is capable of self-loathing and self-destruction, that we are all capable of what we 1-dimensionally call 'evil'. It is a classic that is required viewing: Forbidden Planet. Get past the sci-fi aspects and the 1950s cheesiness. That is each of us, there in that film, hunting down ourselves and therefore everyone else through our own self-destructive self-loathing.


NOW GO WATCH THIS

Linked above is a 20 minute talk by Marc Goodman, an expert on law enforcement and actual/factual terrorism (as opposed to all the conveniently abusive re-definitions of that the term 'terrorism'). His talk is entitled: "A vision of crimes in the future". It's about what I call 'Future Noise' that is likely to get in the way of discovering self-growth. It is about The Lost imposing their self-destruction upon the rest of us. When I watched it I thought about the term 'FUD'. Here we have what may well be 'practical' FUD as opposed to propagandist FUD. I like how Marc Goodman ends his talk. He points out that this encompassing human 'inner world' is for all of us to consider. We can all take responsibility for helping The Lost out of their hell while helping ourselves be free from their inner worlds of self-deception.

What does that mean in our personal lives, our own inner worlds? What does it take to remain our positive selves amidst the acts of ANY self-destructive person? Does it matter how big the invented catastrophes around us become? Does it matter what convoluted methods are used to throw us off from self-actualization? What does it take to remain our best selves at all times, in all weather, through every disaster? How do we grow to become spirits that don't need to be victims of real or imagined Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt? What is our individual path to becoming our best selves in spite of all the noise from The Lost around us?

There's the great challenge. Getting there is the point of our great gift of choice.

:-Derek
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