Privacy is a problem… | binary-chaos

There’s this thing that happens when people spend too much time together isolated from a bigger group. They get to know the shittiest tendencies of others and see it in a context of privacy that creates a horrible resentment not only toward them but against people in general.

In a community, people can’t end up stuck with only theirs and one other perspective, or even in a family model where people end up in dominant roles and impose their need and want on the rest. In an actual community, people don’t end up locked in a battle of perspective where they feel like the other is an enemy. Where arguments become intractable battles and every private bit of ammunition can be used against each other in horrible ways. Where nobody is there to see how horribly they can treat each other when frustration exceeds a threshold and every nuance of annoying habit can be used as ammunition to hurt the other.

A real fully interdependent community would never allow this opportunity. You would not be able to slowly build the resentments away from other’s counsel and reflection, slowly distorting your understanding of the other’s truth.

This poisons us. Horribly. This privacy is destruction and causes more alienation than almost anything.
We should never have this much time to build this kind of narrow misunderstanding. We need multiple perspectives to keep our rigid thinking from allowing us to convince ourselves we are right and the others are an enemy. We should never have unequal power in our relationships, where we know we can assert whatever emotional hell is possible on another because they lack the power to hold their ground. This is a destroyer of relationships.

In a full community, we’d have real accountability and no place to hide privately to tear each other down. Mediation would be there to keep the ultra irrationality away. We could see other ways, hear understandings from other parties that break the fixed perspectives that lock us at each other’s throats in frustration and feeling powerless. It would keep us from digging deep into the other’s insecurities when we are angry, and give us the needed compassion to check ourselves.

The nuclear family or pair-bonded living arrangement breeds poison. It shows us our worst tendencies in fucked up psychological warfare against people we care about the most. Community or extended families are the checks and balances for the human animal. Bringing perspective and clarity and accountability that privacy cannot offer.

So often when things are at their worst and we don’t understand why things are so fucked up between each other all we’d need to do is expose it to an outside people(s) and we’d have to face ourselves and deal with the issue without any power to hide by using all the shit we know about the other against them to kill communications that expose us. We would already always be exposed, and we’d be used to it.

It would simply never be possible for it to get as bad as it can.

This is another way, intentionally or not, that we stay divided. We know too much about too little and end up too exposed in the wrong way under conditions that are too limited to allow for a big enough perspective for it to not go to shit.

Privacy is poison to connection.

And the fucked part is that we then think this means everyone is like this. Missing the point again that the conditions themselves are responsible for the expression of our worst traits. Out of fear we alienate ourselves to protect ourselves from being hurt and end up distorting the potentials we could have for real connection. Because we put the burden of all we are on just a person or a small family unit and don’t realize we were never designed to take on that much.

It’s terrifying to think about what it would mean to always be exposed. But the real security is that by being so we’d never have the opportunity to get stuck in myopic thinking ruts that fuck up our heads. No singular focus and resentment breeding itself in our subconscious waiting to attack when a perceived threat comes. Because if you are always exposed, just like everybody else, nobody can use anything against you. You’d always be changing your perspective, as a norm. Your strength would come from your capacity to adapt, not hide. With others, not alone.

This is how we destroy alienation. Without community, life is often a living hell.

Originally published at https://www.binary-chaos.net.