Dialogue: One place privacy does really matter

By GARTH GEORGE

After reading all the thousands of words lately about privacy, or the lack of it, I am grateful for just one thing: I still have full control over the most fundamental of all privacies - the privacy of my own mind.

I value that privacy above all others and I am thankful I wasn't born in another time and in another place where even that ultimate privacy could have and would have been abused and even stolen.

Imagine, for instance, being born and raised in Russia and its satellites or in Germany in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Imagine being brainwashed and propagandised from birth so that that most wonderful of organs, the mind, was reduced to blind and unreasoning obedience.

Imagine having to test every thought against the political correctness of the fascism and communism of the day, being scared even to entertain a notion that might slip out in an unguarded moment, frightened to share a thought with even your closest friend in case it might be misinterpreted.

Imagine being dragged from your home, thrown into a dark, cold, filthy cell, tortured mercilessly for hours, days or even weeks until the entire contents of that most private of places had been emptied of all that was in it. Or, later, being injected against your will with truth drugs so that everything you ever experienced, dreamed of, hoped for, loved, feared, hated, felt guilty or shamed sbout, yearned for could be extracted from your mind, leaving you an empty shell - a nobody, a nothing. For, as the Bible says, a man is what he thinks.

I smile when I hear people says things like "My life is an open book" or "I have nothing to hide." That is not true, can never be true, of any of us, for the mind is an erratic and undisciplined thing, even in the most innocent of us.

Rather do I applaud the honesty of people like a friend of mine who announced in mixed company years ago, apropos of whatever we were talking about: "I don't have to look at pornography - I have a pornographic mind."

None of us has control over what thoughts come unbidden to the mind. A breach of that privacy would be insufferable. I shudder to think what life would be like if it were possible for this newspaper, for instance, to get hold of some of the dreams and fantasies in which I sometimes allow myself to indulge.

Would it not be intolerable to any one of us for others to know the real heights of our passions, the hungers of our souls, the pain of our hurts, the viciousness of our resentments, the number of our fears, the extent of our hatreds, the depth of our insecurities?

What a disadvantage it would be if our mental evaluations of people and situations were capable of being prised out of us by those being observed.

But all these, thank God, can take place in the privacy of our own minds and I would rather die than lose my sacred right to that.

So the thought police, the upholders of today's political correctness, those poor, benighted do-gooders and know-betters of whom James F. Foord wrote so eloquently in the Weekend Herald last week, can go back to another time, another place.

The only other privacy which matters a damn to me is the privacy of my own home. Way back in 1628 the English jurist, Sir Edward Coke, uttered these immortal words: "For a man's house is his castle, and each man's house is his safest refuge."

How lucky we are that this is still true in New Zealand today. Yes, I concede that bureaucracy - local authority bureaucracy in particular - has often done its damndest to invade that privacy, and that under certain strictly defined circumstances the law can, in fact, invade it, but largely the sanctity of a man's home remains intact.

So I understand the distress that comes to those whose "safest refuges" are invaded by criminals who come to steal and sometimes to rape - and rape surely must be the worst of all possible physical invasions of privacy.

Home, as I have said before, is a sanctuary, a place to which one can always escape to get away from the noise and bustle, the stink and racket of modern life; a place where, save for the requirements of family life, one can be oneself, do what one pleases when one pleases and admit only those who are welcome.

As for all the other privacies or lack of them about which so many people seem to be up in arms, I don't give a fig about how much or how little you know (or can find out) about my family, my employment history, my academic qualifications, my doings, my comings and goings, my medical history, my finances, or what videos I choose to watch.

And your spy cameras can't see into my head.

* garth_george@herald.co.nz