Reflections on Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny,” Lesson 14
I kept starting this essay and then stopping because it feels absurd. Do regular people really need to worry about this?
Do regular people have secrets that someone could exploit? Do we have anything of value that would cause someone would go to that trouble?
Maybe that’s what makes us vulnerable.
A few years ago, I found myself regularly wondering if the office I worked in had been bugged. There were too many odd coincidences.
Then, it extended to other spaces. Maybe my phone had been hacked?
I started to feel like I had no privacy. I couldn’t have a conversation or even a thought without it being known and potentially used against me.
I learned to restrict my words inside the building. I had to be careful with whom I shared even the most benign information. The simplest questions became evidence of my disloyalty.
That’s how thought policing works. The fear of constant surveillance forces us to keep quiet and even to suppress thoughts. We lose any sense of having a private life because “big brother” is always listening.
We are taught that our thoughts are bad (sinful), they cause division, they are immoral, we lack credibility.
Note that these are not reasoned arguments, they are ideas intended to worm into our minds to cause us to question our right to think.
A private life is a space where we are free to think. It is the essence of liberty.
What if we’ve been taught that there’s no such thing as a private life? What if it was drilled into us from childhood that someone is always listening? Someone is keeping track of every impure thought, every blasphemy, every dark fantasy.
What if what we were taught about an omnipresent and omniscient God was a corruption of the truth, conjured up by people who were more interested in our obedience than our faith?
What if God doesn’t have us under constant surveillance? What if David’s poem means the opposite?
Maybe David was in awe that the God of the universe, who knew his innermost thoughts, would never abandon him. That there was nothing that he could do, or even think, that could separate him from the love of God.
What if at the heart of Christian deconstruction is the search for a private life - a place where we can be free to wonder about God, about the universe, about evil, and about salvation? What if people want the freedom to walk into the wilderness and encounter the living God?
What if all people want is the freedom to think for themselves?
What of the “big brother” that we were taught to fear is not the government, but toxic Christianity?
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