My post from earlier today:
Taken from the 1973 booklet The Curse of the Oval Room, written while he was in Folsom Prison, Timothy Leary speaks about government surveillance and has a surprising answer as to how we should approach it.
"Secrecy is the enemy of sanity and loving trust. If you keep secrets, you are an insane paranoiac. Concealment is the seed source of every human conflict. Secrecy is always caused by guilt or fear…
Let’s break out of the huddle. Before J. Edgar Hoover there were no secret police in the USA. Before World War II there was no C.I.A. and America was amazingly unconcerned with secrecy. The hidden sickness has become lethally endemic…
Now comes the electronic revolution. Reveal-ation. Bugging equipment effective at long distances is inexpensive and easily available. Good. Liberals want stiff laws against bugging. It’s the wrong move. Legalise everything. Legalise bugging. Let’s forget artificial secrets and concentrate on the mysteries.
I can tell you bugging is nothing to worry about. I’ve been tapped, surveilled, tailed for ten years. In Algeria everyone knew of at least three taps on international calls – Algerian, French and C.I.A. The Algerians knew every move we made. That’s why they liked us. I was called in once by the Swiss Secret Service about some threats on my life. They offered me body guards. I looked at the chief agent and laughed. “Moi! Merci, non.” The agent laughed with me. “Professor, the Swiss police never sleep. We watch over you twenty-four hours a day.” Any true intimate secrets are preserved in the tender codes of love. Privacy is woven with electronic threads of contact that cannot be INTERCEPTED. Love has nothing to hide.
Secrecy is the original sin. Fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crimes against love. The issue is fundamental… The purpose of life is to receive, synthesise, and transmit energy.
Communication fusion is the goal of life. Any star can tell you that. Communication is love. Secrecy, withholding the signal, hoarding, hiding, covering up the light is motivated by shame and fear, symptoms of the inability to love. Secrecy means that you think love is shameful and bad. Or that your nakedness is ugly. Or that you hide unloving, hostile feelings. Seeds of paranoia and distrust.
Those who love have no need to hide their actions. As so often happens, the extreme wing is half right for the wrong reasons. They say primly; if you have done nothing wrong, you have no fear of being bugged. Exactly. But the logic goes both ways. Then F.B.I. files, and C.I.A. dossiers, and White House conversations should be open to all. Let every thing hang open. Let government be totally visible. The last, the very last people to hide their actions should be the police and government.
We operate on the assumption that everyone knows everything anyway. There is nothing and no way to hide. This is the acid message. We’re all on cosmic T.V. every moment. We all play starring roles in the galactic broadcast: This Is Your Life. I remember the early days of neurological uncovering, desperately wondering where I could go to escape. Run home, hide under the bed, in the closet, in the bathroom? No way. The relentless camera “I” follows me everywhere. We can only keep secrets from ourselves…
I laugh at government bugging. Let the poor, deprived, bored creatures listen to our conversations, tape our laughter, study our transmissions. Maybe it will turn them on. Perhaps they’ll get the message our love-shine transmits: there is nothing to fear." -- Timothy Leary, 1973
