On Tyranny

What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life. We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it. During the campaign of 2016, we took a step toward totalitarianism without even noticing by accepting as normal the violation of electronic privacy. Whether it is done by American or Russian intelligence agencies, or for that matter by any institution, the theft, discussion, or publication of personal communications destroys a basic foundation of our rights. If we have no control over who reads what and when, we have no ability to act in the present or plan for the future. Whoever can pierce your privacy can humiliate you and disrupt your relationships at will. No one (except perhaps a tyrant) has a private life that can survive public exposure by hostile directive.

The timed email bombs of the 2016 presidential campaign were also a powerful form of disinformation. Words written in one situation make sense only in that context. The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification. What is worse, when media followed the email bombs as if they were news, they betrayed their own mission. Few journalists made an effort to explain why people said or wrote the things they did at the time. Meanwhile, in transmitting the privacy violations as news, the media allowed themselves to be distracted from the actual events of the day. Rather than reporting the violation of basic rights, our media generally preferred to mindlessly indulge the inherently salacious interest we have in other people’s affairs.

Our appetite for the secret, thought Arendt, is dangerously political. Totalitarianism removes the difference between private and public not just to make individuals unfree, but also to draw the whole society away from normal politics and toward conspiracy theories. Rather than defining facts or generating interpretations, we are seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark conspiracies that explain everything. As we learned from these email bombs, this mechanism works even when what is revealed is of no interest. The revelation of what was once confidential becomes the story itself. (It is striking that news media are much worse at this than, say, fashion or sports reporters. Fashion reporters know that models are taking off their clothes in the changing rooms, and sports reporters know that athletes shower in the locker room, but neither allow private matters to supplant the public story they are supposed to be covering.)

When we take an active interest in matters of doubtful relevance at moments that are chosen by tyrants and spooks, we participate in the demolition of our own political order. To be sure, we might feel that we are doing nothing more than going along with everyone else. This is true—and it is what Arendt described as the devolution of a society into a “mob.” We can try to solve this problem individually, by securing our own computers; we can also try to solve it collectively, by supporting, for example, organizations that are concerned with human rights.