> Fascinating, isn't it? Yes. From a human psychology POV it's absolutely fascinating (in the sense of being an open puzzle that compels one to ask deep questi

> Fascinating, isn't it? Yes. From a human psychology POV it's absolutely fascinating (in the sense of being an open puzzle that compels one to ask deep questions). It concerns much more than illegal mass surveillance. What is truly astonishing is the distance between the stories we tell ourselves and the reality we inhabit. It's the same denial and rationalisation that means we can cope with climate emergency. Our age is the spectacle of the chasm. There's an enormous gulf between our mythology - what we tell ourselves about our rational civilisation, our empowerment by technology, our omniscient knowledge, our social contract, our freedom... etc - and the reality - that we have almost no basis for reason (except within narrow confines of science), are dominated by our technology, live in ignorance and fear, have torn up social contracts and become slaves to 19th century ideologies. This is the interregnum in which you can have revelations on the scale of Snowden exposing colossal constitutional violations, and have people shrug. >> to have an 'official' perspective is to be able to move on with your life Except people don't. They pretend to. In reality they move on with a shadow of what approximates to life under the conditions of extraordinary dissonance. They become docile, domesticated shells of real people for whom cultural, educational, economic and spiritual life dimensions are crippled. The awareness of dominance doesn't magically vanish, it is sublimated into broad cynicism, sarcasm, duplicity and inability to trust or believe in anything. Don't mistake tolerance for the effects being rendered harmless by wilful ignorance.