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Mencken once said that many Americans, due to their Puritan roots, live in "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." This surveillance and its
by cubano 11y ago
Mencken once said that many Americans, due to their Puritan roots, live in "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
This surveillance and its informants, such as are discussed in this article, seem to me to be the embodiment of this fear.
Many people, for whatever reasons I will never be able to fathom, seem to get some sort of thrill on snitching on the activities of others whom I guess they feel are enjoying themselves too much.
Maybe its envy...maybe its some authoritarian streak... I don't know, but it sure exists and many of my old friends have been bitten by its ugly bite.
- the_crispr 11y agoThe business about the puritans is a cute intellectual toy based on trivia and truly ancient history. There is no relationship between a centuries-old minority subculture, and the bestial, militarized nuclear power that projects power into orbit, throughout the skies and across oceans today. There's enough porn on the internet (mostly originating from the United State) to prove that with an accidental twiddle of your fingers into any search engine.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoYou misunderstand puritanism, it has many tentacles that have stretched to many corners of american culture. It still has a strong presence in our standards of media "decency" where abominable violence is fine but naked bodies, eroticism, or rough language is clamped down on to an extreme degree. It also has lots of little weird echoes and side-effects. Consider, for example, the way that overly happy, "bubblegum" pop music is denigrated, especially by those who think that valuing "sophisticated" and "mature" music (whether it's classical, prog rock, speed metal, or what-have-you) is important. Or look at the legal prohibitions against drug use and sex work. Or look at the modern trend, especially online, of ironic detachment. There's very much an undercurrent of looking at pure, unfiltered exuberance, enthusiasm, and enjoyment through a skeptical, dour, or peevish lens. The fact that people enjoy looking at porn in private doesn't change that.
- irixusr 11y agoI would argue that watching porn -in secret- is a symptom of Puritanism.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoWell, pretending you don't, and especially being critical of others when their private habits are revealed, sure.
- tomc1985 11y agoSo the rest of the world group masturbates? Certainly haven't encountered any of that in my travels...
- irixusr 11y agoI would argue that watching porn -in secret- is a symptom of Puritanism.
- irixusr 11y agoI would argue that watching porn -in secret- is a symptom of Puritanism.
- mesofile 11y agoWhile I'd agree that the modern espionage-industrial complex is not motivated by old-fashioned Puritanism in the historical sense, it certainly does have roots in the sort of naive moral authoritarianism (which we call small-p puritanism) that political and religious figures have exploited to great effect in American society since Anthony Comstock and before. The creation of US security services like the FBI and CIA and the cultures they engendered owe a great deal to people like J Edgar Hoover who had a keen sense of this kind of puritanism, and accumulated a great deal of power by leveraging it.
- dalke 11y agoDoes "Puritanism" here reflect more a parochial understanding? The English have their own espionage-industrial complex, including one CCTV camera for about every 10 people, and a native author, Orwell, who famously wrote about near universal surveillance in Nineteen Eighty-Four. There's also the Five Eyes of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, wherein an espionage agency in one country can route around laws which restrict surveillance of citizens by simply asking a foreign agency to get the information and share it with the former. This might be based on a 'naive moral authoritarianism', which in the US might include 'puritanism', but I don't think puritanism captures the basis for the multi-national, espionage-industrial complex, any more than attributing it to some sort of 'Anglo-Saxonism' might.