Majority of Americans approve of feds snooping in name of security

By David McElroy · June 11, 2013

What if you spent your whole life trying to alert people to something you knew would upset them, but when they finally did hear the message, they shrugged and said, “So what?”

Surely that’s the way some libertarians are going to start feeling as they realize that the NSA snooping scandal isn’t actually a scandal to most people. Many libertarians I know have spent years of their lives dedicated to spreading the word that the government is abusing the rights of the people.

“If people only understand what the government is doing to us, they’ll join us and vote the statists out of office,” many of them believed.

It turns out that the majority of Americans approve of the NSA snooping. That’s right. Not only aren’t they ready to rise up against oppressive Big Brother, they’re rather happy — because they think Big Brother is keeping them safe.

According to a new poll done last week by Pew Research — after the NSA online and phone spying stories came out — 56 percent of Americans think it’s just fine and dandy for the feds to monitor the phone calls of millions of Americans. Almost half of people of people said it’s OK for the federal government to review our emails, too. That’s been consistent over the past decade, because 45 percent approved of it in 2012 and 45 percent approved of it in last week’s poll.

On the broader question of whether security or privacy is more important, the results aren’t even close. The poll shows that 62 percent of Americans say to investigate threats even if the actions infringe on privacy, while just 34 percent say privacy is more important. Those numbers haven’t changed much from previous runs of the poll. Politicians can always make a case that there’s some threat to be investigated. Right?

Let’s be honest. Privacy just don’t matter that much to most people, especially when politicians have convinced them that government agencies can protect them from nameless boogeymen in exchange for giving up rights.

This is yet another reason why it’s folly to expect Americans to suddenly start supporting libertarian-oriented candidates. They don’t want what we want. Most Americans want to be taken care of. They’ve bought into the illusion that they can be safe and “free” — as long as they’re willing to give up more and more of their rights to Big Brother.

Even if I still believed in the morality of a majoritarian system, I wouldn’t bother trying to get people to vote for candidates who favor what I believe in. That’s because the majority don’t want what I want. I’ve accepted that — and I’m more interested in finding freedom in a way that lets them have what they want and lets me have what I want, too.

It’s the only strategy that has a chance of working — because “the people” are never going to be with us.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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