Security
A friend calls me and, among other things, tells me she is shopping for “security systems.” I listen to her talk about “response features,” “installation modes,” “wireless sensors,” and “interactive monitoring.” She tells me she is not anxious or afraid but just wants to be smart. She lives in a safe suburb in Connecticut but because it is safe it is a target. I say something about how you can’t win but she doesn’t think I’m very funny. I agree with her and wish her good luck.
The nation in which I live is not calling me up. Employees of the nation are variously monitoring me so they don’t have to call me up. They already know what I am up to. Or they are not monitoring me but they could. Either way, numerous security systems are in place and growing as I type this. My nation, like my friend in Connecticut, is not afraid. Nations do not talk about being afraid. Nations do talk about security. Other nations are like schoolyard bullies: always looking to pick on someone. Nations have proud, ancient enmities or recent ones that they are working on. Or a group of focused individuals can attack a nation which means everyone is a potential enemy. And some people are. Nations that have identified such people feel they have the right to kill them. And they do. Though they have flags and ideals, nations, particularly powerful ones, are nasty characters. They have no choice. Power is an inherently fraught commodity. It comes at someone else’s expense.
Modern technology has offered seemingly endless control and control promised security. Those in charge of national security tried to soothe the nation’s citizens by emphasizing those promises. One of the stranger dramas of modern times consisted of obsessed, if not downright maniacal people explaining that they were quite rational and lucid. Accordingly, the United States was scoured on a periodical basis for subversives. Since the United States touted the ideal of freedom, it was understood that the price to be paid for freedom were violations of freedom. Behind those violations, there lay hysteria, prejudice, contempt, ignorance, and loathing. Those were wretched feelings but their scale was minor compared to what was going on in other places during the twentieth century. Whenever I brought up such civil incursions with a Russian friend, all he had to do was say the name “Stalin” and the discussion was over.
If nations are always in the grip of one mania or another, as political parties contest agendas and react to unforeseen events, or dictators suspend political activity and assert some wanton, corrupt version of truth, then security, as it is obsessed with reaction, may seem a relatively lesser mania. Yet, security is as much an imaginative phenomenon as a real one and has the potential at any moment to tip fear into persecution. Threats to the nation are just that—threats. They haven’t happened and may not happen. The nation dare not wait but those in charge must determine what a threat consists of. The large numbers of gun homicides that plague the United States are not a threat. If they were, gun laws would be much tighter. Although the numbers of those affected are likely to be much fewer than the annual gun homicide total, a terrorist attack is considered a much graver threat. The gun homicides (and suicides) are a given part of the social texture. They just happen (often amid poverty, despair, and racism) while the terrorist threat is untoward and outside the social texture. Threats are menacing whereas daily deaths are part of the endless tumult of human passions, ebbing and advancing, ebbing and advancing.
Constant fear becomes relentless vigilance. In one sense, this always has been occurring. The night watch and the sentries at the gate were being vigilant about incursions. In modern times, the stakes were much higher and the opportunity for persecution vaster. An enemy of the state was someone to whom anything could be done. If the state was identified with the likes of a Hitler or Stalin, then the imaginative consequences were beyond frightening. In some sense, the dictator’s own security, his own mental field was at stake, and anything was justified to retain that sense of security. When Germany invaded Poland, Hitler invoked “national security.”
In a democracy this sense of security must be played out in the political arena, but as security becomes a permanent apparatus with a life of its own, less and less is discussed. Only when there is some scandal—secrets are revealed or someone is fingered who should not have been fingered—does discussion occur. Otherwise, security is presumed to be ongoing and more or less omniscient—a necessity based on permanent fear.
Such fear is disfiguring and can turn the most mundane psyche into a wonderland of uncertainty and dread. To accept this wonderland as a norm is to enter a place of permanent insecurity. Amid all the emphasis on security, such insecurity is rarely mentioned, as if it had no life of its own. But it did and does. Anyone who lived through the Red scares after WWI and WWII in the United States, anyone who was spied on during the war in Vietnam, anyone who encountered provocateurs during the Civil Rights movement knows that. You may be the enemy.
Perhaps more frightening, however, are those who sit and judge what is threatening and what is not. Such judges are likely to cite facts and data as if no imagination were involved whatsoever in their endeavor. To call attention to the nature of such an imagination and its dire consequences, one only has to say the name “J. Edgar Hoover.” “The chief,” as he was known, could be a vindictive man.
Security cannot release us from being human, however much we wish it would. There are people with malice on their minds; no one is arguing that. The degree to which any nation should exhaust its imaginative resources on such people is very arguable. Imaginations that have been given license have a way of running away with themselves. What they find and what they do may be worse than any threat. They may destroy what they were supposed to protect.
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, those who would relinquish freedom for security deserve neither.
Fear, threat, security, power, surveillance, control and freedom. So many important concepts, intimately connected, in personal and societal multi-way trade-offs toward some reasonable balance.
Those in power often misrepresent the nature and extent of the threat to induce fear to gain the people's assent to surveillance and to cede their freedom in the hope of gaining security. Do we get the promised security? Those in control hide the nature and extent of the threat to "protect us" and to protect their means to protects us. The nature of any averted disasters is also hidden from the populous to better protect them. So, the populous has no means to independently check the value of the trade-off and the effectiveness of the measures. That would seem to create a system ripe for abuse by the unscrupulous.
"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," says Benjamin Disraeli. "You want me on that wall; You need me on that wall," says Colonel Jessup in a Few Good Men.