It’s all spyware, which is why there is Zero Trust. And Zero Trust is the epitome of secured insecurity. The premise of relying on a device suggests people cannot be relied upon unless they are surveilled with the help of strangers objectified as if they were not there, or were trustworthy because we’re paying them. Yet distrust, paid for or not, is the premise of spying. You don’t spy on those you trust or on those whose privacy you respect and care for. And yet we do because the devices we have bypass natural social interactions and plunge our loved ones into worlds of strangers with only virtual context.
And that’s making us spiritually, socially, and psychologically dysfunctional as a free nation trading its people’s freedom for perceived personal security associated with one’s digital devices that are inherently insecure. This trends in trading in our national security and freedom by vesting our connections in an eminently hackable technology. For in wanting the idol of dopamine-wired convenience and virtual connection believed to be safety, we embrace dependence on zero-trust while compromising natural situational and personal awareness.
This mess has become a circular conundrum in need of newer, deeper freedoms that neither tech, trusted professionals, or government can lastingly generate or guarantee. Human freedom, uniquely human, is freedom of the conscience. Until the conscience is free, an external and profit-driven surveillance state will be a cast and crutch on minds that eventually sickens people. The Russians and East Germans once knew this sickness under the ideological surveillance state. It reached a point where zero-trust meant no more glasnost, institutional sclerosis, and interpersonal inhumanity rooted in a bribery economy to obtain basic needs.
The sicknesses’ symptoms will show on people’s faces. Those symptoms will be picked up by the surveillance software that is part of the complex that caused the sickness in the first place, and distrust reignites. Gaslighting will become the police state’s first mode of accusation of the sickened citizen, and weight of endless suspicion a hell on earth.
However, there is a greater yet completely private surveillance state, and it is a state of mind within called “conscience” in which one surveils one’s own heart, mind, and soul in relation to one’s good higher power and other people. Conscience minds relationships with personal presence, not virtual tracking or written assurance as substitutes. Conscience is the journey to the innocence we lost in our relationships. To genuine love of others. We will know when we find it because we once had it, felt it, and can appreciate it more than ever when have the patience to build the fire for others to gather round, sit down, and be in the presence of each the other(s).
The fundamental connection to conscience is a reconnection to one’s source or higher power of goodness, a goodness ethos, and love of other people that all people need as they need air, water, and food. I don’t know the percentage factor that the ever presence and distraction of digital devices substituting for human connection represents in mental and physical illnesses and ailments, but it is not trivial.
After the Cold War seemingly subsided, spy tech became a private sector market as did GPS, a military technology. Gee, how exciting it seemed. Some technically inclined people with no interest in humanities, law, religion, or history training gushed about total surveillance during those halcyon days of futurism without memory.
Comedian Jim Carrey illustrated in part what a person is like who gives into this sort of thing in utopian wrapping without questioning it in “The Truman Show” and what happens when they discover the implications of their sense of loss and what is missing.
Consider when we are bad at listening to another in our lives as we are distracted by our device, or by the promise that information available on the device impliedly offers a more time-saving self-help tutorial for whatever problem or aspiration our loved one brings to us. Consider how this can isolate us from them. Whereas what people need interpersonally to unglue their own thoughts and feelings and reach higher awareness and wiser understanding is personal love and acceptance with undivided, un-rushed listening, not a quick-reference tutorial on what they should do, feel, think, or ingest.
Human presence, trust, and conscience reinforce each other to establish interpersonal human purpose, import, and personal excellence.
