Paradox of Privacy..

The paradox of privacy
by Underground Panther in the Sky
Why do we desire to have separate houses, separate rooms? Separate tables when we go to restaurants, separate cars?

This desire for a wall of separation between other people is a recent innovation. It is a thing created to manage people and discourage solidarity...

Our culture's need for privacy is manufactured. A social control experiment gone awry. It is the result of a long trend of state sponsored social conditioning.

Private institutions and courts in the late nineteenth century and federal agencies in the twentieth took a particular form of family autonomy and privacy, present only in a minority of the population, and worked to spread it among the rest of the population — even if it meant violating families that violated the prim "norms" these agencies set as examples for society to conform to. These agencies were unwilling to accept diversity in family or community life. Maintaining a particular "norm" the "nuclear " family is at the heart of a lot of social control in this country and a cause of inequality.

Early proponents of properness, privacy and domesticity turned to state power to create public and private coercion to induce family and community conformity. They intruded upon people's home life and privacy to enforce their own vision of what 'proper' home life and social divisions must be. And this intrusion into privacy, in the name of privacy, went beyond obvious examples like the enforced segregation of blacks and whites in the south. Families were torn apart literally, if they were poor, different, or had children that were not properly submissive to authority, or prim enough in their manners. The more courts and officials institutionalized their 'ideal' of childhood and parental responsibility, the more inclined they were to literally institutionalize people and stigmatize functions that did not fit into their idealized nuclear family models.

If a family failed to create 'adequate' personal privacy between each other, failed to achieve economic independence, or didn't obey 'proper' gender roles, state institutions took over the household.. Children were sent to "reform schools" or foster care if their mother didn't look "normal" enough for the state's extreme puritanical definitions of a "fit" mother.

Around the Civil War era, these proponents of "privacy" and Victorian mores had two main goals of social policy. They were to "free the nuclear family from it's formal entanglements with kin and neighbors" (The Way We Never Were, pp. 128) and to make diverse communities uniform. This was disrespectful to the humanity of the people it affected. This was a program designed to slowly undo the trusted kin and friendship connections of people to others in their own communities and to end communal childrearing.

The subjugation of families to public authority did not stem from a collectivist or socialist agenda but from an attempt to build individualistic definitions of private responsibility. State Institutions fostered a form of personal responsibility that was geared to a competitive and structurally unequal economic order. For example, schools taught children that "helping your friends is cheating." This had the effect of making people struggle harder to hold their own, and to glorify and mystify notions of independence. And it introduced more stress, isolation, exhaustion, and loneliness. This kind of manipulation served the business people and church crowd that ran the state back then very well.

This grand design for social separation was the brainchild of tweaking Victorian churchmen and greedy insecure businessmen who found close-knit communities and solidarity of people who were less than wealthy or not too prim, who were socializing in urban tenements or the street, upsetting and threatening. To the upper crusties the people out on the street, particularly the poor and immigrants talking to each other, were too much for their paranoid constitutions to bear. They grew hysterical and referred to simple socializing of the wrong classes of people as an addiction — much like crack cocaine today.

The Victorian marms and control freaks set about making laws to isolate people and turn them into symbols of social deviance. Even the US Commissioner of Labor, Charles Neill, declared in 1905: "There must be a separate house and as far as possible separate rooms, so that in an early period of life... (marketers say get kids conditioned before age 7 and they'll be brand loyal). So the ideas of rights to property, the right to things, to privacy may be instilled. " (The Way We Never Were, pp. 136)

Soon after that came the loitering laws, limits on where people could gather, limits on how many people could gather, and what they could or could not do together. Zoning laws and building codes arose to reinforce people's separation from kin and community. Stores, churches and institutions gobbled up living space, suburban sprawl came to be a formidable force to exploit close habitation of different kinds of people by economic and distance segregation into individual living spaces that separated people from contact with each other and communal social spaces even further. Soon the demands of time, housekeeping, and hobbies began to segregate people's lives into compartments just like the suburban landscape and the commute to go anywhere reflected many lonely rooms in their homes...

We turned into a nation of strangers communicating to each other via church- or state-created identities in the media.

When the state butts in to separate us, divide us, to manipulate us with divisive labels, it creates more reaction and hostility between people. When the media, politicians, and community leaders use divisive labels and divisive issues to undermine solidarity and community cooperation, people seek identification and group loyalty to fill the empty hole left by the systematic erosion of our natural human solidarity and sense of relatedness to diversity that is part of every community. The identities offered in the social sphere, often tend to separate us from each other and ourselves all the more.

And the intervention of the state to enforce religious legislation, or to pass overly restrictive or unnecessary laws, becomes a poor intrusive substitute for better solutions that truly can correct the damage done by previous state, church, or corporate intrusion into our privacy.

Also, consider the ambiguity towards privacy within the religious right, today. In the past, Victorians enforced separation, isolation, and the undermining of community and solidarity especially among the lower classes and immigrants. They violated privacy to enforce their view of privacy. In comparison, Modern religious conservatives are concerned about the state intervening to stop them from beating their kids.

James Dobson, and Jerry Regier, Jeb Bush's appointee to the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF), for example, are suspicious of any state regulation against child abuse. They want the right to beat their children or spank them. Regier wrote back in 1988, "The Bible is not at all uncertain about the value of discipline, 'Although you smite him with the rod, he will not die. Smite him with the rod… save the soul. '" At that time Regier was a member of the Christian Fundamentalist group Coalition on Revival. That group endorsed spanking children even if it caused bruises and welts. They wanted to make premarital sex and masturbation illegal. They believed that Christians shouldn't marry non-Christians and that married women should not have careers. Regier previously worked for George Bush, Sr., as head of the National Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Dobson, Regier, and others imply some notion of privacy within the home to allow them to potentially harm children, masked under the banner of religious freedom. Yet they both are very much opposed to the right to privacy as defined by the Supreme Court.

The right to privacy was used in the Griswold decision, to overturn a Connecticut law against married couples obtaining contraceptives in 1965. The right was extended to protect a woman's expectation of privacy with regard to her own body and decision with her doctor to have an abortion in the first trimester, and then throughout the pregnancy. The right to privacy may also be invoked to overturn the current Texas Sodomy law, which was used recently to prosecute two gay men who were having consensual sex in the privacy of their own home.

Such conservative Christians would support their right to privacy within the home to provide cover for potential child abuse, but would throw away any principle of a right to privacy that would prevent state intrusion into the private bedrooms of consenting adults.

Compare that to the common sense view that the right privacy does not grant immunity from reasonable search and seizure, or hinder due process and investigation to enforce legitimate laws against child abuse, incest, abuse of power, fair contracts, etc., but prevents the state from being over-intrusive in private affairs, for example, where no one is beaten, threatened, coerced, conned, etc. Reactionaries want the state in our bedrooms, and everyone else wants to prevent the state from intruding needlessly and dominating our private lives.

We all love the idea of the state butting out of our private lives... But when private life becomes a danger to life and limb for those living within those walls, we wish for state, family, or neighborly intervention. A tyrant in the home requires those whom he tyrannizes to maintain an illusion that the brutality that goes on in private isn't really happening. Families become enablers and secret keepers.

Because of a household tyrant's need for suppression and for privacy to abuse people, privacy and securing it is of overblown importance to him. A privacy abuser's reactions to a symbol is similar to the symbolic over-reactions of gun owners to any regulations of guns. Privacy abused in this sort of situation enables privacy abuse by the state.

Domestic abuse is a dire problem in our country, when those who report child abuse are as follows: Professionals (including teachers), law enforcement officers, social services workers, and physicians, make more than half (56%) of the screened-in reports. Others, including family members, neighbors, and other members of the community, made the remaining 44 percent of screened-in referrals regarding abuse.

It's tragic when only 44% of our own kin and home communities dare to get involved in confronting domestic abuse, and prefer instead to let the state handle it. And 56% of those reports only happened because the state was stepping in where kin and neighbors failed to. Where was the community's concern and empathy? Where were friends and neighbors? Were they all inside their private homes, too oblivious to notice, in their own rooms, sitting alone with the TV on or a video game going on to drown out the sounds of real violence with fake violence?

Which would you rather have? Some kin, neighbor, or friend we know or are aquatinted with step in to chill out an abuser that's abusing a kid, and then alert the whole neighborhood to watch out for the kid's safety, ready to provide a place for the kids to go when the shit hits the fan as the cops are called? Or would you rather have some state-regulated over-worked social worker with a huge caseload to tell him to stop hurting people, on the way to the police station before he's released on bail to keep on abusing people? All while no-one else outside admits they might know about it, or when they do know they still refuse to help?

Kids die this way, folks, even at the hands of their own parents. This inspires a public outcry from the bothered for church and state to step in as parents. People die at the hands of normal looking, quiet, all-too-private sociopaths who nobody interfered with or even suspected was a problem individual. Assuming the best, ignoring the suspicions, keeping to themselves until the stench of dead bodies under the crawlspace is unbearable and the state is called to fix it.

I myself would trust myself and my own neighbors to investigate violence they overhear in our neighborhood. This simple act of human concern for a fellow human being may save many lives in abusive homes, because it ruins the secrecy games enablers enact to protect themselves from harm. It destroys any delusions of lordship through privacy that a household tyrant craves so he can keep abusing people.

People are less likely to intervene in domestic violence nowadays because we do not socialize as freely with each other any more, in the streets and neighborhoods of America. And because we move from place to place chasing jobs, we never get to stay in a neighborhood long enough to put down roots and participate in neighborhood or civic life.

So if I don't know my neighbors, the state and its impersonal intervention looks safer to me because it's regulated by others, somewhat (usually by citizen-elected "officials" or citizen-created advocacy groups.

Isn't this ironic? We want state intervention when other's privacy is abused, and we want that state power for intervention supervised by people who are citizens to keep it respectful of our privacy rights, but these are uninvolved people who have no clue who we are, personally. We hate having our own privacy violated, yet we are eager to invade others' privacy through the apparatus of the state, to make sure there isn't any consensual homosexual sex or gay adoptions going on.

The state has taken the place of familiar human community supports. It is impersonal, the way the state controls social interactions and puts an end to solidarity in community. TV, computers, video games are usurping our free time, and the media's constant harping on tragedies and crimes of the unknown person in the neighborhood has helped this social isolative process along psychologically. The loitering laws, chronic suburban sprawl, the necessity of cars to get anywhere, air conditioning, and other various actions and inventions of business and the passivity or unawareness of unions all contributes to this malaise.

Look, if neighbors all across this country knew each other and didn't fear neighborly diversity, because we knew our diverse neighbors personally, it might make people less stuck on believing bigoted rhetoric, less gullible to manipulation, and less prone to get reactionary over other people's ways of life. We would not need the state to intervene to tell us to get along, if we didn't forget how to relate and get along together.

When it's someone you know well and respect who's in trouble, it feels different because there is a relation there. The impersonal state and other institutions of this society have no authority to lord their self-serving social models and agendas over you, when they appeal to things like empathy, ethics, and other values that are inherent in living beings. When the state does this type of appeal to the better parts of humanity, it is coercive, intrusive, or impersonal. When the state appeals to empathy or the needs for ethical behavior from someone, it calls in another intrusive profession or social institution, like psychiatry or the church to tell you how.

In isolation we feel more vulnerable to symbols and we feel more powerless when we think we have no allies that understand us socially.. So when the state gets ugly or a company screws us to the wall we are more likely submit to it because we fear abandonment, homelessness.

Homelessness is a life without privacy or things. Homelessness goes directly against our social conditioning. Homeless people have networks of people who know them and they do support one another. But because it involves poverty, people fear the homeless more than they ought to, allowing the state and businessmen to make the homeless into a scary symbol... something one best keep out of one's community.

Because humans loathe the unknown, and unknown people, and are wary of differences they don't understand, and we love our privacy to the extremes even more than we care about each other, we can remain uninvolved in neighborhood and community relationships on a personal level.

When privacy is abused and we can't ignore it or shut it out, we have no choice but to ask the state to fix it when nothing else can fulfill that role. The state won't fix it really, because the state has its own agendas, which dovetails nicely with our very scripted planned reactions, all fueled by certain unquestioned beliefs about people, by our fear, ignorance, isolation, and imagination, and by those worse-case scenarios dancing in our heads along with the TV news.

We behave today, to some extent, as we were planned to behave by state lawmakers in the nineteen hundreds. We often act like the wealthy hysterical Victorian legislators and churchmen living in the late nineteen hundreds, as we fret over "those undesirable strangers entering our antiseptic segregated suburban "paradise." We gossip so arrogantly and ignorantly about those "other people," those "criminals on the street corners," those "rowdy youth," those "bums." We admonish people that are not like us, people we don't relate to. Because we have overvalued our own privacy, we think we don't have to learn how to get along with others. We can go on endlessly about "those other people" doing nasty unChristian things in private, or doing things we wouldn't ourselves do in public as we do the same damn thing in the sanctity of our home.

This kind of blazing bullshit hypocrisy is only possible where people refuse to relate to one another on human terms beyond their familiar cliques, and instead choose to abbreviate real people into symbols and have nightmares about "them." It's much easier to dehumanize someone you've never talked to.

How vivid the human imagination becomes when it is isolated from human-to-human community relationships. How malleable and controllable we all get when we're atomized into our separate houses, separate rooms, separate cars, in a town full of strangers shut up in their own domiciles lording over it, possessing all these things ... but are secretly suffering for want of a true friend and somewhere to go on a Saturday night besides getting drunk out of your skull.

A community relationship is the only way to dull the loneliness and boredom of your life. You cannot have your privacy cake and eat your neighbor's privacy in this human situation.

But we have become so timid, over-polite, passive, and socially awkward. We can't just walk up to a guy on the street and ask him to coffee; we are all too busy, too awkward. We assume they don't want to be bothered with friendship, and so our social conditioning is never challenged.

How convenient this is, to those who fear community and solidarity. How tyrannical we become when we think we are powerless, because we are by all observable evidence alone... abandoned by everyone, to fend for ourselves, alone against the whims of a dog-eat-dog world. How vulnerable we feel when we have painful pasts where no one heard us or stepped in to help.

Fearful privacy and misuse of personal power becomes a refuge from fear of the "other," and a refuge from corporate/state control and time management. Privacy, while it feels safe, is also a haven for creating even more fear and reaction of the "other," who is dehumanized into a symbol. This kind of privacy invites more state intervention and control.

We need community relationships to temper our tendency to react or to be tempted by extremism. Absolute privacy and state intervention as a substitute for a neighborhood... it is a tragic and profitable paradox of symbols in this modern civilized life.

" Day after day, They send my friends away
To mansions cold and gray,
To the far side of town,
Where thin men stalk the streets,
While the sane stay underground...

... "Cause I'd rather stay here with all the madmen,
Than perish with the sadmen roaming free,
And I'd rather play here With all the madmen,
For I'm quite content they're all as sane as me."
—David Bowie,
excerpted from "All the Madmen,"
on the album "The Man who Sold the World"
~ : ~

Excerpts in the article are from The Way We Never Were, by Stephanie Coontz.

http://www.unknownnews.net/a0509.html#upits505

individual to individual. I go absolutely crazy if I don't get my private time, whereas I know other people who can't stand to be alone.

Also, people from Northern cultures seem to need more "space" than people from southern cultures for some reason, I am not sure why. I am specifically thinking of Europeans, but it seems like in most cultures the northerners are always a little more reserved and introverted than their southern counterparts. My mother was of N. European extraction and my father was Italian and the difference in how they behaved socially with each other was like night and day. Sitting by yourself in a room reading was acceptible in my mother's family, whereas my Italian relative considered it rude.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the more people are outside, the more they tend to come into contact with other people so they have learned to be more comfortable with others.

And I think even close knit communities know how to give an introvert extra space,and because they knew each other well enough..If the introvert got in trouble or needed a shoulder to cry on, or help fixing a broke sink in the kitchen,or if a neighbor knew an introvert loved fresh summer squash and dropped a bag off for them on their porch because the squash were coming in all over and there was no way one family could eat it all..would you say that is a nuisance? A good neighbor who was told it was not ok to leave squash would not do it again I think,but they might ask you if you are out trimming hedges,just to share...

It is good to have someone else trusted living nearby who would be there because people who know each other enough to know to trust you..the "closeness" would be personally respectful of you and your ways.I have been in close knit living situations before and I am extroverted mostly..but I can become very introverted too I go back and forth. People who know me know if it's one of my moods VS I am in danger or a depressive state. And since they know me as a person with my quirks and are not scared of them they know when to help me and when to leave me alone ..and for that I am very grateful..Everyone needs some trust connection with someone else,preferably alot of someone else's . Right now I am doing without it and it is so very hard.

Jun 23, 2006 6:47 pm US/Eastern

Americans Have Fewer Friends, Thanks To Tech

Mike Hydeck
Reporting

(CBS4) Between work, errands, and other obligations it can be hard to keep up with friends. In fact a new study says that more Americans are now feeling a greater sense of isolation – thanks in large part to technology.

The site of somebody sitting alone on the computer has become a typical scene in many American households. Throw in the general hustle and bustle of day-to-day living and it's no surprise that Americans don't feel as connected to one another as they used to.

A new study says that in 1985 the average American had three people in whom they could confide. That number today is down to two.

Twenty-five percent of Americans say they don't have anyone with whom they can discuss personal issues....

http://cbs4boston.com/watercooler/local_story_174144908.html

Many of those people sitting front of those computers have
a lot more friends than we would have without the net.


The political divisions that have grown up in this country since then could easily account for that.
Without the net it would probably be a lot worse.
Consider all the DU'ers who report that they are surrounded by Bushbot Fundies in their communities.

It isn't a face to face relationship.
Unless the net is a tool to meet people offline.

A face to face relationship has a depth and bearing of self and sharing of lives ,a net based type written relationship cannot do.People when they get offline sometimes feel depressed..Why is that? Because maybe when the nets gone they realize how much they need real people.

http://archive.salon.com/21st/rose/1998/09/03straight.html

It can be a very effective tool for that, as well as keeping
a relationship alive over periods of separation. I would not
so easily discount the value of purely online contact either.
The fact that it is different from a face-to-face relationship
does not make it worthless or a waste of time.


I assume YOU are a real person. I am a real person. We are real people using the net to carry
on a communication that we would not be able to carry out otherwise, because we probably will
never see each other. You live on the opposite end of the continent. (If it helps, my avatar
really is a picture of me). I am not at all sure that our discussion would work as well if we
were having it face-to-face, as much of what you say bears more thinking about than a typical
conversational pace allows for.

Communicating over the net has its advantages.

Communities don't know anything. Communities are made up of people

Of those people, some know, some don't.

Of those who know, some don't care, and there's usually one who will go out of his way to get in your face.

a community is important - that's why I like living in my little neighborhood in NYC. People know me and say hi and we chat, etc. I also am a member of a 12-Step program which is another community within my community (West Village.) However, I can also go up to my apartment and be alone (well, kind of, except for my roommate) if I want as well.

I almost think introverts need that sense of "community" even more, since we don't choose to spend a lot of time around others, it's important for us to connect and be a part of when we are out and about - even if it's just for a few moments.

People in warmer climates being outside - developing more interaction - more gregariousness.

People in the North adapting to long winters inside.

And now - everyone has air conditioning.


I enjoy my own space - but I do see the lack of community as a failure in our society. Some communities - it's easier to interact in than others. And for me - I've found liberal minded communities to be far more engaging and interactive. Through free music in the parks. Art events. Poetry in the coffeeshops. Community groups. Activist groups. Stuff like that.

We all sat outside under the trees,kids played outside.
In the 70's-80's there was not this moving around chasing work, people had time to put down roots, they got to know home.. and now because people are not accustomed to heat anymore they stay inside,I am guilty of this too. I sweat like a dog outside..but I got to thinking back when it was 85 I always wasn't so uncomfortable in this....what changed? I think it was air conditioning.
It changed how my body perceived heat. And if you think about it..Air conditioning is such a convenient crowd control device.Luring us to stay indoors and not to socialize..it broke solidarity further .. all by our desire to be comfy..But at what cost is this climate controlled comfort? Nobody asked that question as far as I know when air conditioners first came out. If they did I'm sure everyone called them a conspiracy nut..When AC first came out for homes I know we all wanted one. Our first AC was a window job,we hung sheets up over the doorways to keep the cool air in the living room ,but the other rooms were hot,and over time we got better air conditioners so soon the whole house was eternally 74 degrees and going outside just was uncomfortable.So we didn't..

also, the northern climes tend to be more sparsely populated.

northerners want to run away to the hills by themselves once winter is over, heh heh.

Being cooped up in close quarters with others would certainly make one crave their personal space.

Because we don't all like the same music or the same decor or the same food. We aren't all going to the same place, either.


It is also a brake on the pressure for total conformity that occurs if it is not present.


Whereas every other culture has no need for privacy whatsoever :sarcasm:


Not really an issue of privacy. People don't stay all their lives in the town they grew up in, and that their
parents and grandparents grew up in. Chances are the jobs that their grandfathers did aren't there anymore.



Indeed!


And they never stop trying. We need our privacy, most of all, to protect us from THEM!

You cite more contemporary examples of the value of the right to privacy yourself:


You imply that we should not be allowed to have any secrets from The Community, but what if The Community are a bunch of bigots?

of whom we are living near. If you have no social skills and want to dominate than of course people won't want to be near you.

But a REAL community is not about domination by a few or a majority..

It's about social skills,diplomacy, learning to give and take,how to draw boundaries personally and socially, and to respect one another and yourself at the same time. People bring up arguments like yours because we as a people do not remember how to draw interpersonal boundaries,or social boundaries and enforce them.We forgot how to act as individuals and relate as a community at the same time. It is not a perspective of an individual VS Them and bending THEM to your will or else. That is a top down domination model. In reality a community is not led by a leader per se,it is an environment shared by and shaped by me,you and all of us..and in a dynamic interrelationship made of many individuals negotiating many needs giving taking sharing and negotiating.Understand? You can't always get what you want and neither should they. But if you get some f what you want sometimes and they sometimes get what they want,you all will have what you need.

If you know the neighbors enough to know who the bigots ARE in your community, YOU can set a standard,draw a boundary and lead by assertive example by standing up and not by-standing when a bigot acts like an asshole. In reality there is not a love all people requirement when you build a community . There are boundaries that must be drawn for the sake of being able to tolerate one another.No community has to accept bigots or let bigots partake of the relationship. Do you relate to every asshole like you do your best buddy? THan it can be the same with a community.You can draw a boundary and exclude the bigots and not trust them or tolerate their behavior and you can encourage your neighbors to do the same it's called persuasion and skillful means...You can say no to bigots in your life .Without shutting out the rest of the world.

When I lived in the city, that was a lot more people than I could even remember names of, let alone have any kind of basic understanding of.
With a significant percentage moving in/out every year. I don't think crowding us even closer together and tearing down all the walls would
change that.


It is the ones with very good social skills who want to dominate that are much more of a problem. They become politicians.
One of their favorite ways of dominating is come up with a scapegoat and sic the "community" on them. It works every time.


That is true where I live now -- a tiny mountain community where we all have a great deal of privacy.
It was not true in the small town in which I grew up, nor in the cities and towns I lived in later.
I know that goes against the urbanist theories of community, but it is my experience.



Many our ancestors came here because their efforts to draw such boundaries failed so spectacularly that boarding a sailing ship for the New World
seemed far the best option. If we have poor social skills, it is very likely hereditary. The American Dream was always about having enough space.
What sort of people dream that sort of dream enough to act upon it?

A lot of social skills are actually hard-wired instincts -- For you, and probably for most people in the world.
But not for everyone. For those of us who lack those instincts, social skills are only learned with great difficulty,
and applied with considerable (exhausting) effort, as it is a basic neurological difference.

Any attempt to build community here must accomodate the fact that we are a country full of people whose ancestors fled the communities they grew up in.

Right issues, right heart, gentle paws. :loveya:

let's not forget to distinguish between consensual and nonconsensual intrusions on privacy. There's a huge difference between me knowingly sharing my private space vs. someone intruding into my private space without telling me.

And balance is appropriate. I might be willing to share all my secrets with someone who's sharing theirs with me -- e.g. the Bush admin. After all, Bush theoretically works for me, so I've at least as great a claim. But that's not what's happening.

This essay seems to me to be lumping too much together under "privacy". While there may be validity to his description of historical trends, courteous and reasonable respect for privacy does not necessarily have to do with xenaphobia or acquiescence in child abuse.

To me, privacy is about recognizing where reasonably boundaries are and respecting them. The boundaries can and should fluctuate. Normally, I shouldn't rush into someone's house without knocking, but if it's on fire and I can save someone within, we rightly agree I should presume that that person would want me to rush in.

This is exactly what I mean, Maybe my article was not articulate enough as it should have been I wrote it long time ago..But What I want to say is..we need to relearn social skills,like making and enforcing boundaries VS Respect of space as individuals and as a group. And you cannot learn this sort of skill without a real community to learn how to do it in.Situational psychology can explain some of this conditioned fear and hyper individualism.And it can explain how some communities never get the balance right....If you lose these skills and refuse to even try to relearn it,because you fear all the failures you read about,when you try to make a community it will not happen,And we are indeed playing make believe we are little islands and this fear driven lie will be our species path to ruin.

That Texas sodomy law was overturned in the Lawrence v. Texas decision,
one of the last pieces of good news to emerge from the Supreme Court.
(3 years and 2 Bush** Supreme Court appointments ago).

More fundamentally, it is neither necessary nor particularly good salesmenship
to promote the concept of community by suggesting that it should be some huge
glass house where we all live together with absolutely no privacy.

You cite abuse as a reason we should all surrender our privacy.
I wouldn't sign up to live in that glass house no matter how much abuse I was suffering.
As for putting the abusers some place with no privacy, that is what prisons are for.

Historically, communities have been shockingly tolerant of domestic violence.

I'm going to have to copy this and save it somewhere and come back and refer to it later. And I know a bunch of other people who'd like to read it too...

A few things I can think to add to it tho:

I recently finished reading The Abolition of White Democracy, by Joel Olson. Racializing slavery here in America perfected the institution, by making it obvious just by looking at a person whether they were supposed to be a slave or not-- Another way of separating people.

As a saying among a lot of people I know goes, "Property is theft," because when you claim something as your own, you prevent anyone else from making use of it. Of course, our capitalist economy depends on people claiming things as their own-- Another way of separating people.

You can make your argument for community involvement taking the place of state-sponsored intrusion into people's privacy even less intrusive still by turning that social interaction around. Greater community involvement wouldn't reduce private abuse simply by making neighbors more familiar with each other's private lives, it would also reduce it (and more effectively so, I think) by connecting abused people to community members they could-- and would FEEL like they could-- turn to for help. Consider all the abusive relationships you've ever heard of, and I'm willing to bet you'll notice that they all involve the abuser making the abused to feel like no one else cares about them. Another form of separation and privacy that's necessary to maintain in order for an abusive relationship to continue. Women don't stay with abusive husbands when they feel like they can leave them and make lives for themselves on their own, do they?

And look at the statistics of abuse,1 in 4 women before age 18 are raped..look up other forms of violence,child abuse,domestic abuse violent crimes,it's very scary...We are suffering from massive traumas and we are isolated by it,we suffer in lives of quiet desperation conditioned to believe reaching out is not wanted or a weakness,and it is nothing but our culture that teaches us to disrespect ourselves.. And so many of us feel trapped,lonely scared to tell off the boss and demand vacations,or benefits,because we can't make it by ourself without a job. So we pull those bootstraps and smile,and slowly die from stress..And we dare not run next door and cry at a strangers kitchen table who lives next door,who we see everyday for years 'because we don't know how to relate so of course we don't trust them to cry in front of them we don't know them..we avoid relating because we assume they would not care,or would not want this..imposition or we think that we are the only ones cracking under this pressure and so we stuff it and keep on being the rugged individual king of the castle but heavy is the crown that chains us....The chain is inside OUR own HEADS..and we don't know how to rebuild trust because of that chain and crown illusion of self sufficiency and properness we believe is so important to maintain.. It is what keeps us bound and alone not trusting and not knowing how to relate,break the ice..We don't socialize when the pressure is not driving us batty. Nor do we reach out unless the house is burning down..We have lost our social boundaries and balance..It goes on and on,we are scared to ask for help,when it is not desperate,and when it is desperate we seek impersonal services from the state..why? Because we fear trusting one another..This broken trust dynamic it filters so much of how we see each other and what we think a community is..
It's so so,sad. And so almost "victorian" of us this keeping up of appearances..This culture of make believe...

...But unfortunately, a lot of people's chains are buried so deeply in their minds that no amount of psychiatry or anything else can ever break them. A lot of emotional damage can be inflicted on children while they're growing up, before the children have a choice to do anything about it or even realize it's happening. That emotional damage gets built into their developing neurology and becomes a part of their physical bodies. Then as adults if they go out and live the way that seems to make the most sense to them, they end up trapping themselves in the same situation they grew up in.

...And trapping their children in it too...

Net use and Isolation
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/february23/internet-022305.html
Social isolation kills people
http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/cgi/content/full/63/2/273
Ieffeciency of social isolation
http://www.jeffvail.net/2005_10_01_archive.html
Isolation triggers child abuse
http://204.155.170.130/artman/publish/printer_12861.shtml
Anxiety and Isolation
http://panicdisorder.about.com/od/anxietymoreinfo/a/anxietysociety_2.htm
Isolation the ultimate poison
http://www.bookworld.com/lucifer/excerpt2.html
It's not good for human beings to be left all alone all the time.

But I think they spend a lot of time on the net because they're isolated,
not because they are passing up face-to-face relationships in favor of the net.

A lot of people use the net, as extended by the cellphone text messageing services,
to stay in constant touch with their friends.

I am more inclined to socialize. When I keep myself away from it - or am forced away for some reason - I am more likely to call someone than otherwise.

I think net connections are an illusion. It's easier. It's easy to feel like you are connected - and we are in a way - we are connected to people we never would have been connected with.

If you are using the net to foster real life connections - then that's different. It doesn't seem to work that way with people I know.

...Intellectual peers number a few tenths of one percent of the human race, trying to meet up with people in real life or on the internet with whom I can carry on meaningful conversation is pretty much a waste of time. (This site excluded of course-- as you may observe from my ever-increasing number of posts.)

And of course, when you start adding in things like emotional health, cultural background, and artistic ability, the numbers only get more dismal...

At least on the net I can interact with lots of people really fast, so I can find some who have something important to say-- as opposed to having to go through a whole bunch of meaningless small talk with someone just to figure out that meaningless small talk is all they're capable of.

See? We're saying important things right now, and we didn't have to tell each other what our favorite movies were in order to get here! :)

Privacy isnt a barrier driving us apart. Citing the frost poem Mending Wall http://www.ketzle.com/frost/mending.htm . I'd instead argue that privacy is something we drive for and have always driven for. Some people more then others, but everyone likes their privacy.

Divide and conquer has been a successful strategy for defeating people for millenia.

Democracy and capitalism both succeed by politicians and business leaders offering people things they already want. But that brings with it the opportunity for corrupt politicians and business leaders to offer people things they want in a manner that will serve the interests of the person doing the offering, not in a manner that will be mutually and symmetirically beneficial to both parties.

In this case, corrupt politicians and business leaders offer people the privacy they want, but they do it in such a way that drives people apart, prevents them from functioning well enough as a community to be able to solve their problems on their own, and makes the corrupt politicians and business leaders seem to be the only people who have the power to solve the problems.

Human social behavior is a very complex interaction of a lot of different components of human behavior. There probably is no major social problem in the world that's all one group's fault. (Sorry if I seem to be talking down to you, but usually I talk over people's heads.)

This is a very recent phenomenon, starting after WW2; backyard decks intead of front porches on houses is quite sybolic of this, so is the nariccistic selfishness of the average American. Most Americans don't live in true communities any more, but just random agglomerations of strangers that are communities in name only. Only small rural towns and some inner-city neighborhoods are true communities.

We are a nation of immigrants.
People who fit in just peachy where they are
probably are not going to up and move to a new land.

What IS the "American Dream" after all?
It seems to be most of all about personal space.

People's social abilities vary enormously, and many
of the differences are neurological and hereditary.
What some do by instinct, others must attempt to figure
out through purely cognitive processes. The latter becomes
utterly exhausting if one is around people all the time.

The need for community is still there, but any attempt to
build community here needs to take this into account.