Freedom, Privacy, and Leadership
Don’t get me wrong. I do worry about my privacy online. But I still have not yet retreated into a tightly sealed personal space, even though I sometimes do, I must admit, hesitate to fully speak my mind.
Why, why not, and why?
Fundamentally we are social creatures. We are one people. We are all teachers and we all are students, of each other. I do not wish to live in a world that is not safe to be myself and speak my mind in. So I try to create this kind of world by not being walled off, to the extent that I can.
Today I google the question, why do wrens scold me, even in the winter? Turns out, others have also mused about this. I find their shared thoughts at the tip of my fingers, a true miracle to me, and a joy. It is like they are my friends, these musers I have never met, communicating with me from another time and place.
Yesterday, I visited with a brilliant and creative newly minted young adult, who laments how they are “exhausted!” by capitalism. This young one has no idea how rich we all are now, in choice, and communication, compared to not long ago at all, thanks to the great proliferation of free sharing of our thoughts and knowledge, facilitated in part at least, by free enterprise. Not that over control by mega corporations is any better than over control by government entities. Just that freedom to launch an economically profitable enterprise is not inherently a drain on one’s energy.
We are so rich, so wealthy in an unprecedented scale, in this freedom, the ability to share and to know and to communicate. Those who were born recently have utterly no idea. Now, we all have a voice. Most use it, pathetically enough, to share selfies, or pictures of our plate of lunch, or worse. The impulses, the instincts, the compulsive drive to fit in, did not correspondingly shift suddenly, so we are left with old cultural habits but new riches.
But now we all can share. So we are all leaders! And teachers, and students of one another. Whatever we in the free world are currently cocreating, it is at least, truly ours. Perhaps it still mostly reflects what we think each other wants to see and hear. But as time goes on, we will either relinquish our freedom by trying to conform to our perception of what we think we need to do and be and think, so as to fit in with each other, or…maybe, just maybe, something new and beautiful will be born! Just behold the diversity of life forms in the natural world! Perhaps we too will become a blooming cultural meadow of beautiful harmonious diversity!
Anymore nowadays, I am as frequently astonished by what I see some people creating, as I may be dismayed by what some others are doing. No wonder some do find it all exhausting. But I find it exhilarating!
If I lived in China or some other zones of repression and oppression today, I would not find the same delight in the transparency of today’s cultural landscape. I would find the stifling atmosphere of yesterdays small town culture, only instead, on an overwhelming and daunting scale! I see a little of that here with cancel culture; young people policing one another’s political imperfections as if judging them for life threatening crimes. To the young ones a clumsy statement or casual comment that is not well considered seems to define them. The very medium for this, the ability to say rude things to each other at a distance, things we would never say in person, amplifies this problem. If everyone were judged so harshly there would none left standing, that is for sure.
It is not safe. The world is not safe. I always come back to the tribal headspace, the psychology of the orientation we evolved from, the tribe of three hundred or so people you can really know and relate to personally. How would this situation compare to that headspace? Fill in the blank. This is my test. In the tribe, everyone knows your business. In the tribe, everyone needs to find a way to get along, because we are all related and our survival depends on cooperation. Sometimes there are intense conflicts. But in the small group of the tribe, everyone is watching, and there are usually leaders to help mediate and settle arguments.
Indeed there have always been beautiful and loving tribes, as well as violent disfunctional tribes. We can see both types on a massive nation sized scale today, from Costa Rica to North Korea.
When the interstate highway system came through the small town culture in this country, suddenly it was possible for outsiders to swoop in, disrupt and take advantage of the natural trust of a tribe, do something bad, and quickly disappear. On a larger scale this has now happened with our global sharing of trade and communication culture amplified exponentially by the interweb. It is dangerous now. But to even try to exist in a physical body is fraught with risk. With greater freedom, as they say, comes greater responsibility.
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