Saturday, February 27, 2016
116. Apple, Privacy, and the State (5)
Exploring the brain is not equivalent to controlling it. In the context of the Art of War, however, assuming we consider the tension between the state and the individual as a state of war, exploring is intelligence gathering, which is the key to victory. When Sun Tsu says be like water which follows the curvatures and holes of whatever it contains, he is talking about intelligence gathering in the context of war. So, if we allow the state to explore the inner workings of the brain, we are empowering the state to defeat the citizen's brain in the event that the state and the citizen ends up in a conflict like a war. Nietzsche would agree that to know the brain is to have power over the brain. Should we allow the state to have power over our individual brains? No. It's an Orwellian scenario I'm painting, but this is pretty much what will happen to us if we allow the state to be governed by paranoia and empower it take over our brains. Thus, the state should never know what is in our brains. The physical matter? Sure, in the interest of science. But it should never have access to our thoughts. It should never know how, why, and what we think. It's our last inch of power against the state. If we give up that little space, we give up our freedom. We give up our humanity. We become mere creatures of the state.
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