Category: Essays

Essays written about various topics.

This is Not Philosophy

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date May 26, 2017

Valedictorian Speech for Maeser Prep Academy Class of 2017

I am honored to give this speech, I really am, almost as much as I am under-qualified to give it. My speech will be kind of like high school: the best part is when it’s finally over.

Street philosopher and leader of the free world, Drake, once said “Came up, that’s all me, stay true, that’s all me. No help, that’s all me, all me for real.” I just have to say, those lyrics are the opposite of how I feel right now. I am inexpressibly grateful for the people who have shaped me, inspired me, forgiven me, and helped me in endless ways.

First, my parents and family. Their patience with me is inexhaustible, and there is almost nothing that they haven’t done for me. I’m sorry I don’t appreciate you enough. I’m thankful for my friends and fellow students; you almost certainly don’t expect it, but I look up to so many of you. You have made high school an exciting, enlightening, and sometimes strange experience. And of course, our teachers. We have the most inspiring teachers the world has ever seen. There are so many teachers here who could give better advice than I ever could.

Thank you to Mr. Watabe for teaching me that math is simple, and more importantly, life is simple. If you put in the effort, you will get faster, you will get better, and you might even learn calculus.

Thank you to Mrs. Plott for making me realize that velocity is more important than speed; what direction you’re going matters more than how quickly you’re going.

I am grateful to Mr. Dowdle for redeeming humanity despite the horrors of our past, for your effortless humor, and for your life-changing analysis of literature. I’m finally in uniform, by the way.

Thank you to Mrs. Frampton, for showing me that without art, writing, and even poetry, we cannot understand the sacredness of life.

Thank you to Mrs. Martinez, for encouraging us all to be more compassionate. Through her character, she showed us there is no qualification, no skill, and no aspect of your resume that is more valuable than the effect you have on others.

And Mr. Simmons – ah, what can be said about Mr. Simmons that he has not already told in excruciating detail to his freshman Socratic class? Thank you Mr. Simmons for demonstrating the meaning of education as sacred, and for your genuine dedication to your players and students.

Thank you to Mrs. Slade, for showing us the wonder of the natural world, the miracle of the human body, and the power of human potential.

Thank you so much to Mrs. Sidwell, who isn’t here today. You introduced me to the sound of my own voice. The impact you had on my life cannot be underestimated.

I can’t list all of my teachers and mentors, but I have been changed by every class I took at Maeser – yes, even Financial Lit. Especially Financial Lit.

Maeser is one of the at the best high schools in the state. Honestly, it is easy to feel intimidated and inadequate in a school of stars like Maeser.

After all, not all of us have Logan Norris’ relentless determination;

Not all of us are as kind as Morgan Millet;

Not all of us have James Johnson’s flawless ability in acting;

Not all of us have the perfect calves of Felix Resendiz.

Few of us are as fearless as Bennett Felsted and Jared Drake,

None of us can do as many pull ups as Jacob Radmall,

And David Van Horn isn’t here, but few of us are as mature, contemplative, or understanding as him.

Not all of us are as ready to give compliments as Brittany Oveson.

None of us can beat Taylor Brand’s scoring record;

Few of us have the constant cheerfulness and optimism of Ben Hailstone or Maliana Corniea;

Few of us have the easygoing attitude of Braden Christensen;

Few of us have the quiet wisdom of Tashara Muhlstein;

None of us party as hard as Dakota Clubb;

None of us work as hard as Lia Joo;

We can’t all jump as far as Sammy Windley, sing as high as Varia Aird, or play the piano like Anastasia Felt.

None of us can parkour like Olle Hansen.

Few of us have the resilience of Mustafa Hamidi;

And even fewer of us have the hope and strength of Sophie Cannon.

I could keep going, I promise you.

But despite the fact that we can’t compare ourselves to the people around us, each of us has an opportunity – no, an obligation – to share our unique and powerful selves with the world. Growing up with you all in the last few years has been an incredible experience. Because of this, I will ask that you remember one thing after this speech: never think you have nothing original to say, never think you have nothing important to do, and never think you have no purpose.

Often, our endless routine overwhelms us like the numbing smell of burnt popcorn in the cafeteria microwaves. The beating repetitiveness of everyday life causes us to reduce ourselves to just another student, just another worker, just another brick in the wall.

People often say things like this: “I don’t have time for philosophy. I have bills to pay.” If you have not yet said this, then just wait – in college, you will say it or at least think it. How do I know this? Well, I don’t, but I’m up here making sounds, and that’s the important thing. That’s what I’m here for.

But honestly, it is easy to become swallowed up by the mundane parts of living. We should all be terrified that without even noticing, we will slip into a trivial life of grinding for grades, working for mere money, depending on empty praise, obsessing over flimsy worries and meaningless stresses, becoming something we aren’t to impress people we don’t like. Unless we watch closely, the ordinary will consume us. Unless you pay attention, your purpose will disappear like quicksand. Smooth and natural. With barely any sign you can notice or suspect. And you walk on it easily. When you’ve noticed your purpose is gone, it’s too late.

So when you find yourself saying “I don’t have time for philosophy,” remember that this is not philosophy, this is life. You don’t have enough time to not think about it. With every day, you should consider the fundamental, the deep, the sacred, the truth beyond the mundane. Otherwise, why wake up each morning?

Clear away all the debris that separates you from that essential, bright, illuminating part of yourself – that core that is much deeper than personality – your soul, your life-force, your chakra, or maybe it’s just your appendix or something. Avoid the things that reduce you and make you trivial, and look for those things that make you passionate, deep-thinking, and full.

Lin Yutang said that “Those who are wise won’t be busy, and those who are too busy can’t be wise.” Reject the idea that you can afford to merely fill or kill time; your busyness will prevent you from seeing beyond routine.

Well, as Dylan Armstrong said, I’m sorry Maeser, but I’m breaking up with you. Luckily, I’ve already set someone else set up so the rebound will be quick. She’s kind of out of my league, so I proposed to a bunch of backups in case she rejects me. Also, I’m going to need her to pay me like 50,000 dollars or it’s not going to work out. That’s basically what applying to college is.

I’ll eventually forget about my times with Maeser, but I will remember what I learned from the relationship. After all, it lasted four years, and I have done so much with Maeser – my sweat is on her field, my tears are on her desks, and yes I admit it, my popcorn is in her microwaves. I learned that the pursuit of truth, the process and journey itself, is always worth it – even if that truth is as difficult to find as a high-quality meme on Facebook. I learned to always remember my real purpose. To live beyond the mundane. To be inspired by those around me.

Now is the time to put these principles into action. As Epictetus said, “From now on, whenever you encounter anything, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event.”

And most importantly, pretend my last line was super funny.

Essays Philosophy

A Kierkegaardian Approach to Philosophy: Replacing an Objective Career with a Subjective Relationship

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date January 21, 2017

Update three years later, 5/14/20: I wrote this before going to college. I had never studied philosophy in an academic context. After spending 3 years studying philosophy, I think this post is too cynical. Academic philosophy is better, more impactful, and more personal than I expected. I still agree with many of the ideas & sentiments I express here though.

Philosophy has been firmly and comfortably institutionalized. It exists primarily to teach useful, marketable, career-building skills, buzzwords like critical thought and complex reasoning and clear writing. Philosophers are another cog of capitalism, mass-produced in university departments to either join the economy or perpetuate the academic study of philosophy. Like physicists and biologists, they are judged by their ability to produce original, peer-reviewed work. Philosophy is a specialized field along with the sciences, practiced in research institutions.

Any ‘serious’ philosopher is found solely in the university; no longer can philosophy be practiced by any audacious questioner. Measured by gross product, philosophy is more successful and productive than at any other time in history. Thousands of philosophers throughout the world produce well-researched, logical papers that engage with the traditional problems. Many of these papers are ingenious marvels of philosophical reasoning. Who can deny the brilliance of Slavoj Zizek’s cultural criticism, John Searle’s philosophy of mind, the late Hilary Putnam’s rigorous analysis, Saul Kripke’s brilliant philosophy of language?

The institution of philosophy.

And yet perhaps we are missing something in this Cambrian explosion of philosophical activity. Philosophy has gained a permanent place in the academy. To paraphrase an introduction to “Socrates Tenured” by Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle, philosophy has its own arcane language, its hyper-specialized concerns, a network of undergraduate programs, and an ecosystem of journals. Like Bertrand Russell, I wonder whether institutional philosophy is “anything better than innocent but useless trifling, hair-splitting distinctions, and controversies on matters concerning which knowledge is impossible.”

The goal of philosophy is no longer to guide individuals on their attempt to become paragons of wisdom and virtue. Its purpose is not to assist the philosopher in reconciling the absurdity of the world, nor can it instigate the creation of meaning out of this nihilism. It is not meant to be related subjectively to the individual who is actually living the philosophy and experiencing its effects. It is meant to produce knowledge. An honest, valuable task – yes. But it is not enough.

After all, this knowledge is produced in the typical academic fashion. It is based on rigorous, ‘impartial’ research by graduates trained in cleverly analyzing arguments. This research is then applied to produce objective knowledge that has no moral impact. I mean: the knowledge is not meant to make one a better person, but to be used as a “de-moralized tool” for civilizational progress (source). Throughout the process, the producers of knowledge remain separate from the knowledge they produce. It is sterilized, abstracted – without impact.

The philosopher argues passionately for his/her thesis, employing every art of logic available. But what if the thesis is true? No matter. It will not change the philosopher’s life nor anyone else’s. It is merely another postulate verified until refutation, another step on the track to tenure. As Kierkegaard wrote, “not until he lives in it, does it cease to be a postulate for him.” It is ridiculous to imagine the philosophers living by their theses.

All this production and institutionalization is merely disguising a catastrophe. We are facing the same problem in philosophy that Kierkegaard faced in religion: the demise of the subjective relationship. We have lost the duty to philosophy that Socrates felt and in some ways died for, the intimately personal, individual relationship to the content of our study. At his final Apology, Socrates said “as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy.” He had so fully embraced philosophy that any other form of life was “not worth living.”

Philosophy is not merely a set of practices and shared academic norms. It is a way of living. And if it fails to be a way of living, all its academia will be unmasked as hollow. Then could Nietzsche’s madman declare with certainty that along with God, the Philosopher must be buried as well – “We have killed him — you and I. We are all his murderers” (The Gay Science). Divorced from the lived experience of the philosopher, how can philosophy be meaningful? If philosophy is to have any value, it must be “through its effects upon the lives of those who study it” (Bertrand Russell).

Perhaps no one but Kierkegaard has articulated this problem in all its scope. In his Truth is Subjectivity, he wrote:

Our discussion is not about the scholar’s systematic zeal to arrange the truths of Christianity in nice tidy categories but about the individual’s personal relationship to this doctrine, a relationship which is properly one of infinite interest to him. (source)

To be a philosopher, one must take a radical leap. It is like Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, the jump into the abyss. Namely: one must be willing to live by one’s conclusions. After all, philosophy claims to both describe and prescribe reality, the ethical life, the social sphere. If this is the case, then how should we live differently because of it? If Plato is indeed correct about the immortality of the soul, what then should we do? Every philosophical premise, when carried the full length, has an ethical conclusion. They dictate what should be done.

Make the leap!

But even here we encounter a problem. We are supposed to live by our conclusions, yes, but we are also supposed to live by the method of philosophy. And yet this method questions every conclusion. How can we live by a conclusion that can be called into question and invalidated the day after? Philosophy is built upon the dialectic, the constant shift in thought and relentless doubt of each and every premise. An objector might claim that the dialectical is fundamentally antithetical to the meaningful, as a life cannot be built upon an ever-shifting foundation.

Perhaps, then, Kierkegaard’s approach is only sensical in religion. After all, religion is not dialectical. It remains solid, and thus a subjective relationship can be built. A subjective relationship to religion builds a bridge between rock-solid cliffs; a subjective relationship to philosophy builds a bridge between wind and tossing waves. One must be able to stop somewhere if a meaning of life is to be built, and religion provides the stopping-point.

Philosophy, however, is not incapable of providing meaning. It has merely been so often misapplied that it seems impossible to truly live by. The solution is this: one must be willing to set a direction for the dialectic. Kierkegaard himself did not set a rock of Christianity and declare “now, build a relationship with this!” His project was to advance, not end the dialectic. His intention was to “create difficulties everywhere” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript). He sought to push individuals to recognize the flaws of dogma, and through this to create their own relationship with Christianity independent of the traditional Nicene doctrine. But this dialectic was not unguided: its goal was to become a Christian.

This aim, in a somewhat paradoxical sense, could only be achieved by first negating it: recognizing that I am not a Christian now. Thus, the dialectic became essential to the process. The creation of a true relationship with Christianity was made possible only through destruction – through eliminating the bromides and dependence on institutions.

This same process of guided dialectic applies to philosophy. By focusing on a specific end goal, our dialectic gains a foundation. New information does not destroy the foundation. Rather, it clarifies and polishes the foundation and assists in its construction. For example, I may decide my end goal is to become a virtuous person. When I discover that one of my practices was not after all virtuous, this does not destroy my ability to live by my philosophy. After all, my end goal is not called into question. I still aim to be virtuous. But my process has been refined, as I now know one more thing that I should not aim for.

Therefore, we now have a basis for developing a personal relationship with philosophy. Before anything, an aim must be set as the goal of all dialectic. Then, we must live by this aim, constantly seeking to refine and expand it. The aim cannot be called into question. This aim is the fundamental, subjective truth, one that is lived by the individual so intensely that it cannot be invalidated. It must be of infinite significance to the individual. It should not be taught in universities, but pursued by the individual.

We must assume the end goal in order to justify the process itself. After all, if we open up our end goal to justification – and therefore criticism – how can we truly be devoted to it? It becomes merely another premise among many, one that may be quickly invalidated by a new paper in an academic journal. Only through the powerful, subjective force of faith can we believe in the end goal. (To clarify, I do not at all mean faith in the religious sense. You’ll catch my meaning as I develop the idea.)

Have faith enough, at least, to make the leap.

Faith, after all, is inevitable in life. Over the centuries, the most powerful trend in philosophy has been skepticism. We have certainly not completed Aristotle’s task of classifying and demonstrating everything, but we have made tremendous progress in Socrates’ task of calling everything into question. In a philosophy where there is no convincing demonstration of the possibility of knowledge itself, how can we claim to have a comprehensive system that eliminates the need for faith? Rather, we have merely shown the overwhelming need for faith.

Faith is a teleological suspension of doubt in the face of uncertainty. The need for this suspension derives from three fundamental and undeniable aspects of existence. First, we are uncertain at the most basic level, and unable to make a decision based on the process of systematic reasoning. Second, despite our uncertainty, we must make a decision. Third, and too often ignored, we have ends, desires, dreams – things that we feel we must accomplish or at least strive for. We may know objectively that these dreams are irrational, unjustified – and yet every individual feels a need to search after some aim. In the face of this telos, it is unacceptable to merely deny agency and revoke our ability to make a choice, and it is unacceptable to choose arbitrarily.

How can we reconcile these three facts of our existence – uncertainty, agency, and the telos? Only through faith. We ignore our uncertainty, and make the decision based on the telos, the goal. We decide our ends and believe them by faith. Every decision must be directed by this touchstone. It is constantly refined through the dialectical process, but the telos itself is never subject to the dialectic.

In his Existenzphilosophie, Karl Jaspers wrote, “Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.” The philosopher should be intimately engaged with the philosophy; it should not be an object of study, but a way of living that has infinite impact. The goal of philosophy must be reexpressed in Kierkegaard’s terms, as the search to “find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live or die.”

Politics

The Fetishization of Individuals: From Hitler to Ken Bone

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date January 20, 2017

Humans have a relentless tendency to treat individuals as microcosms for the world. If we can identify a certain individual who fits into a group, we generalize this individual and make him/her representative of the group or concept as a whole. When we speak about these concepts or groups, we are implicitly thinking of these fetishized individuals. Thus, the ‘philosopher’ becomes Plato; the ‘drug lord’ becomes Pablo Escobar; the ‘autocrat’ becomes Hitler. These people that stand as concrete symbols for entire ideas are what I call ‘fetishized individuals.’

There is a constant political battle for control over these fetishized individuals. If someone humanizes and normalizes Pablo Escobar, they successfully humanize and normalize the drug trade as a whole. They take control of the image of the drug trade – the vivid, personalized, and individual representation. Then, when someone thinks of the drug trade, they think of Pablo Escobar – the friend of the poor, the anti-corruption, anti-communist activist, the family man.

Pablo Escobar as a criminal – the negative fetishization of a drug lord.

Pablo Escobar with a child – the positive fetishization of a drug lord.

When another representation is introduced, it is considered in the context of the existing fetish. Thus, it is extremely difficult to argue that El Chapo is terrible to convince someone who has internalized a positive version of Pablo Escobar as the representation of drug lords. Any logical argument is subordinate to their personal ideology-based ‘experience’ of Escobar. Perhaps a poor man heard Escobar gave out money in the streets and built schools for the impoverished; this gives them an emotional attachment – a fetish in a non-sexual sense – to the narrative of Pablo Escobar.

Modern political conflicts have begun using fetishized individuals in more obvious ways than ever before. The most clear example of this is Hitler, for he is the most completely fetishized person in the world. For almost everyone with an elementary education, mentions of autocracy, fascism, dictatorship, and genocide generate immediate images of Hitler with arm raised. One cannot win the ideological battle of making autocracy acceptable until one has made Hitler acceptable.

The first ideological step of neo-Nazis, therefore, is making the fetish of Hitler positive. This can be done in a variety of ways. For example, the extreme right-wing and anti-semitic site Rense.com published a series of images of the ‘hidden’ Adolf Hitler. Using these images of him – holding children, walking in gardens, smiling – makes it much harder to imagine him other contexts. We find it conceptually difficult to unite the many disparate aspects of a person into a single unified identity. How could the same Hitler that ordered the Holocaust also kiss babies? Psychological research shows that cognitive dissonance like this causes tangible pain. The drive to eliminate the dissonance, then, leads some to fetishize Hitler in a wholly positive way.

A positive fetishization of Hitler

The Netflix original Narcos powerfully represents our difficulty in categorizing individuals. You see Escobar in a variety of contexts – at home with his family, in drug labs, on a farm working, and at war. It becomes difficult to remember his horrific crimes when he is watching clouds with his young children. We can’t really conceptualize a ‘whole’ person – only the person we are seeing at the time. Uniting all the different Escobars into one unified individual is almost impossible. Ideologies take advantage of this inability to unify, and summarize individuals by a single aspect. For some, the need to resolve cognitive dissonance means forgetting Escobar’s crimes to enable a positive fetishization of his figure.

In the most recent presidential elections made fetishization a key aspect of political strategy. In 2008, Samuel Wurzelbacher asked Obama a simple question about small business tax policy – almost instantly making him a key symbol of the presidential election. He mentioned something about wanting to buy a plumbing company, and the McCain campaign leaped at the chance to relate to an ‘ordinary American.’ They coined his new name – Joe the Plumber – and repeatedly used him as an example in campaign rhetoric. McCain used the symbol of Joe the Plumber to show that Obama was ‘out of touch with the average Joe.’ It didn’t matter that Samuel wasn’t really a plumber and his name wasn’t really Joe. Throughout the campaign, writes Amarnath Amarasingam, “A fictional plumber’s false scenario dominated media discourse” (source).

In the modern election, it seems that the myth of the ordinary Joe has taken hold even more firmly. America has a need to believe in the normal citizen, a 9-5er who wants only find his dreams, stick to his moral standards, and support his family. And yes, this citizen is a he – we seem unable or unwilling to use a female figure as a symbol of American life.

Why do we feel a drive for the ordinary? After all, we are obsessing over the nonexistent. There is no ‘ordinary Joe.’ Every citizen has quirks, mistakes, sins, hidden lies, and extravagant dreams that prevent them from being ordinary. Joe can only exist as an idealized symbol, not a concrete individual. And yet the idea of the ordinary citizen is permanently entrenched in our minds. In some way, many people aspire to be average. This aspect of the psyche creates political battles over the ability to protect the ordinary individual, who stands as a metaphor for the whole American citizenry.

Thus, Ken Bone was created. He was a symbol of an ordinary person – appropriately but not excessively involved in politics, working the day job, dreaming small dreams, providing for the family. He was 2016’s version of 2008’s Joe the Plumber. He represented simple authenticity, the everyman – as his Twitter profile proclaims, he is merely an “average midwestern guy.”

He did not decide to become a meme. The media did not make him a meme; they merely capitalized on the attention once Ken Bone had already gone viral. He was not mass-produced by campaign offices and political propagandists. In an act of near-randomness, he was dubbed a meme by the distributed irrational network of sensation-seeking individuals we call the Internet. The random series of viral creations in 2016 revealed that memes are fundamentally uncontrollable. After Harambe, damn Daniel, Ted Cruz the zodiac killer, how could we be surprised that Ken Bone was crowned a meme?

Ken Bone could not even control what he himself symbolized. He attempted to control his own signifier by consistently exhorting people to vote and make their voices heard. But all his efforts, for the most part, failed. Ken Bone does not symbolize democratic participation. After all, memes are inherently dehumanizing. To become a meme, an image must be dissociated from its reality and turned into something else. In linguistics terms, it’s a sign whose signifier is malleable — the image’s meaning, thus, is created by those who share it. The meme itself has no power over its meaning.

This is the danger of living memes – they are tossed around by the whims of the Internet. And when these whims turn sour, the person suffers. Ken’s slightly quirky reddit history was revealed, and he was painted as a monster.

I expect this process to continue endlessly: an individual becomes a sign that stands as a placeholder for a piece of political ideology. The individual is the object of immense attention, and then is tossed out like discarded trash. We should be careful that our memes do not make us think this is what people truly are. And we should not be surprised when the myth of the ‘ordinary citizen’ is shattered by the reality of the individual’s life and being.

Philosophy Uncategorized

The Agent-Age Problem for Consequentialism

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date January 12, 2017

Suspend your disbelief for a moment, and imagine the 6-year-old daughter of a major world leader travels with her father to a major nuclear launch site. She is left unsupervised, and happens to wander into the launch room. There, out of curiosity, she presses the big red button.

This launches a nuclear weapon that immediately kills millions of people. Before the weapon has even detonated, other nations have launched missiles of their own. A single launch rapidly escalates to nuclear war. Billions of humans and nonhumans are killed, and the planet is left barely habitable.

This scenario is clearly implausible to the point of impossibility – the big red button, after all, doesn’t even exist. However, it is a useful archetype that raises serious questions for consequentialism. Consequentialism inadequacy in certain moral issues is clear when the accidental action of a small child leads to immense suffering. I’ll add another example that deals with similar issues, but that is far more likely.

A young boy happens to find a few matches on the floor of his family’s garage. While playing with them and scraping them across the rough floor, one of them ignites. In panic, the child rushes to the garbage and throws the match in. Then, losing interest, he walks inside and finds something else to do. The match lights a fire into the garbage which spreads into the house. The house burns to the ground, killing everyone inside. The fire spreads to nearby houses and kills or injures several more people.

This type of counterexample to consequentialism is demonstrably plausible, as there is empirical documentation of similar cases. According to the Washington Post, at least 265 Americans were accidently shot by children in 2015. Many of these shootings resulted in tragic deaths. Meanwhile, the number of American fatalities due to terrorism in 2015 was about 20, depending on certain counting methods.

In a truly consequentialist atmosphere, accidental shootings by children would be discussed far more than terror attacks – precisely 13.25 times as much. Moral deliberation on an action would be indexed to the amount of pain or happiness caused by the action. But in reality, the ethical issue of terrorism is discussed prolifically, while accidental shootings by children are virtually ignored. Why is this the case? I argue that while the amount of discussion on terrorism doesn’t reflect consequentialism, it does reflect our moral intuitions. We assign greater condemnation to actions not based on the numerical impact of these actions, but based on the intention of the actor, the nature of the action, and the emotional impact of the action.

The probability of child accidents will only increase in our modern world, as dangerous technologies proliferate and become more available, the population expands, and systems become more interconnected. A single accidental action by a child can result in unfathomable pain. However, our moral intuitions indicate that accidental actions by children are not blameworthy. Can consequentialism reconcile this problem?

Interpretation

I will use this definition of consequentialism, based loosely on the one from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“The belief that consequences are the only normative property that affects the rightness of an action.”

Or, in simpler terms, an action is made right or wrong only by its consequences. Consequences are the only morally relevant consideration.

Thus, if this essay shows that there are non-consequential normative properties that affect the rightness of an action, then consequentialism is false. I will use primarily an intuitionist approach to prove this claim – that is, showing that consequentialism is incompatible with clear moral intuitions. I will not touch on whether intuitionism is true; I will just discuss the consequences of its assumed truth.

Normative properties are defined as any ethical aspects of an action. This is a simple and non-rigorous definition that would be considered inadequate by many metaethicists, but it works well for the essay. For example, “rightness of intent” is a normative property, as it is an aspect that could impact the ethics of the action. Furthermore, this would be a non-consequential normative property.

What are the relevant normative properties in the examples above? I will consider the following:

Intent – the actor’s purpose or intended goal in a certain action.
Actor – the individual who commits the act.
Consequence – the morally relevant impacts of the action.

Different moral theories place different emphases on these properties; consequentialism is the theory that only the third property is relevant to the rightness of an action.

In the case of the child pressing the red button, I believe we have clear answers as to the ‘value’ of these properties. The consequences are certainly bad. The intent is morally indifferent, as the child did not intend for anyone to suffer nor for anyone to benefit from her pressing the button.

The most interesting property is the second. Our moral intuitions agree that the age of the actor is morally significant. If a child commits a crime, they are considered less morally responsible than adults. This intuition is ingrained in law – individuals are not usually morally responsible until the age of 18. Some religions have an ‘age of accountability,’ which makes people accountable to God for sins after it is reached. Since children are less capable of complex moral reasoning, they are less responsible for mistakes in this reasoning.

Furthermore, there are also arguments for the moral relevance of the age of the actor that are not based on intuitions. For example, the following deductive argument:

P1. One is not morally responsible for what one does not know.

P2. If one is not morally responsible for what one does not know, then people who know less than others are less morally responsible.

P3. Children know less than adults.

P4. Children are less morally responsible than adults.

Thus, when the child presses the red button, and she does not know that this will fire a nuclear weapon, she is not morally responsible for the nuclear war that ensues. This argument attempts to prove that children in general are less responsible, but it can also be applied in any case where lack of knowledge is involved. If someone does not know the consequences or nature of an action, they are not morally responsible for this action.

Based on clear moral intuitions and the above deductive argument, the action of pressing the button is either (1) less wrong or (2) morally indifferent when the actor is very young or when the actor does not know the consequences. Either case means that the actor – a non-consequential normative property – affects the rightness of the action, disproving consequentialism.

Politics

The Gradual Causes and Long History of the ‘Fake News Crisis’

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date January 4, 2017

It seems undeniable that the specter of fake news has taken control of the media. It seems that we’ve now entered a dark age of journalism, where the fake is indistinguishable from the real. It seems that we have entered an unprecedented era of hoaxing and counterfeiting.

But journalism has never been free of fake news. The Columbia Journalism Review published a detailed history of fake news in the United States. In short: fake news isn’t new, and it has real impacts. For example, people fled the city in droves and marched into public parks with guns after the New York Herald published a fabricated report that dangerous animals had escaped the zoo.

And fake news existed even before Gutenberg invented the printing press. In 1475, an Italian preacher claimed that Jews had drunk the blood of an infant (source). This led a local Bishop to order the arrest of all local Jews, and fifteen Jews were burned alive. The fake story spawned even more hysteria about vampiric Jews, which spread across Europe despite declarations from the Pope to try and end the panic.

Fake news has unbelievable power. In Journalism: A Critical History, Martin Conboy demonstrated its dramatic role in history. In 1898, the USS Maine exploded off the coast of Havana, killing over 250 people. The cause was never explained. The Spanish government, which controlled Cuba, expressed sympathy for the disaster and denied any involvement. The captain of the Maine, one of the few survivors, urged Americans to withhold judgement to prevent conflict with the Spanish.

The headlines after the Maine explosion – based on fake news.

Regardless, Joseph Pulitzer, editor of the New York World, quickly condemned Spain, claiming that they sabotaged the Maine. The World published a cable showing that the Maine was not an accident – even though this cable was completely fake. Newspapers published imaginary drawings of the explosion – even though no one had seen it. Sales of the World skyrocketed, and the public demanded revenge. Fake news helped start the Spanish-American War. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that the namesake of the highest award in journalism, the Pulitzer prize, was a purveyor of fake news.

So is there anything new about the recent fake news? Yes – because Americans are far more dependent on news. News, both print and digital, takes far more forms than at any other point in history – videos, images, blogs, tweets, posts, articles. Almost all Americans can read basic English (source), 84% of Americans use the internet (source), and 79% of American internet users are on Facebook (source)

Never before the last decades has the vast majority of the population been simultaneously connected to a source of instant news. A meme, story, or fake event can spread across the public awareness in a few hours. The fundamental nature of fake news hasn’t changed. It has just become far more common and accessible – just as the modern transportation system allows viruses to spread far more quickly.

A map of global disease spread – not too far from the transmission of fake news.

Furthermore, perhaps the American public has become increasingly vulnerable to fake news. While this claim is hard to demonstrate and somewhat unverifiable, it’s possible that the average reading level has declined. In 1776, the relatively complex, sophisticated pamphlet Common Sense sold 500,000 copies, roughly 20% of the colonial population (source). Now, less than 13% of Americans are proficient in “reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts” like Common Sense (source). It seems that the percent of Americans who can understand Common Sense is smaller than the proportion that owned Common Sense in 1776. Plus, the most recent studies show that American reading proficiency has declined over the last two decades (source). Even among college graduates, the proportion that can understand and reason about complex texts has decreased to less than 31% over the last decade (source).

It’s a viable theory that these two trends – increasing access to news and decreasing reading ability – have shaped a perfect storm for fake news. Americans aren’t as likely, or as able, to make nuanced, reasoned analyses about complex texts. They’re more likely to have access to the oversimplified and sensationalized world of internet news (and news in general). More people can be infected by the virus (fake news), and less people have the vaccine (critical thought). As a result, a single tweet can spawn a flurry of fake news that quickly becomes an accepted part of the American psyche.

However, the concept of fake news is also dangerous in other ways. It has already been used as a political weapon to shut down opposing journalism. The left has used it to deride right-wing sources, and the right has coopted it to attack left-wing news. Already, the LA Times and Washington Post have claimed that right-wing sites like the Ron Paul Institute and Breitbart.com are ‘fake news’ (source).

These sites could be derided as biased producers of dangerous propaganda, but this is not the type of fake news I’m interested in. Breitbart may be skewed, but it does base news loosely on actual events. Fake news is completely counterfeit – without referent in the real world. To avoid ‘fake news’ becoming a tool to eliminate enemy voices, we need to delineate the concept clearly and create solutions carefully.

Reports by @CNN that I will be working on The Apprentice during my Presidency, even part time, are ridiculous & untrue – FAKE NEWS!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2016

This is an intro to some of my further research into fake news. This week, I’m going to write another article about the philosophy of fake news, and then one about the solutions to the problem. I’ll try to relate the issue to Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, examine the differences between Kantian and utilitarian journalistic ethics, and look back to Plato’s critique of postmodernism. Maybe I’ll even make up some ideas of my own.

Why am I so interested? I think that fake news is a microcosm into the larger issue of the ‘postmodern condition,’ which is what I’m focusing on for my three-week independent study. It relates to the need for classical education, which is what I’m studying in a directed readings class. And it’s a good area for philosophical research that hasn’t been fully delved into.

Essays Philosophy

Finite and infinite: the existential wisdom of The Office

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date November 17, 2016

I love The Office because it juxtaposes absurd, delusional people against unabashed authenticity. This comparison isn’t exactly subtle, but it is never explicitly said. Jim and Pam become protagonists not because they receive the most screen time, or the story is told from their perspective, or they overcome all their challenges and become exceptional – rather, it’s precisely the opposite. They aren’t heroes. They are merely authentic, and we can only relate to them because they are the only real people within this office landscape of hollow appearances.

What I find fascinating is the distinction between Michael’s inauthenticity and Dwight’s – are they truly different? Or just two renditions of the same kind of inauthenticity?

Michael’s relentless scrambling to avoid blame, display virtue, and underscore his own importance always fall flat. Usually, episodes end with a convoluted explanation from Michael about how he didn’t really fail, how he wasn’t really a bad person, or how he was the center of it all. The actual events of the episode, though, create a cringeworthy irony. Michael is never outright condemned as a hypocrite, but he is painted as one by the contrast between his own words and reality.

Dwight indefatigably grapples with the pain of an uncertain existence, where unfortunate realities can’t simply be labeled ‘false.’ He struggles to reconcile lived experience and his emotions with the theoretical constructs he has used to rigorously define the world. For example, he completely misses out on the party while examining the construction of the house. He ignores lived experience if it does not fit his hypothetical framework.

Kierkegaard argued that we should strike a balance between the finite and the infinite (similar to what other existentialists refer to as facticity vs transcendance, but not exactly the same). These two qualities exist in a dielectric relation: they are opposed to each other, but cannot exist without the other. For instance, the two sides of a scale are opposed to each other, but the scale cannot exist without both sides.

“A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way a human being is still not a self…. In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

Diagram I made to illustrate Kierkegaard’s dialectric between infinite and finite.

The Finite – The finite represents our actuality or necessity, the concrete here and now. It is my reality as a definite thing in the world: the room I live in, the hands I hold with, the face I must present to the world, the physical structures I am embodied within.

Sartre and De Beauvoir referred to a similar idea as facticity. This word has many meanings for different thinkers, but these two thought of facticity as all the concrete details that frame our lives, by which human freedom is limited; the cement of our existence. Some examples of my facticity includes the fact that I was born, the time of my birth, the language I was taught, my race and the genetic composition of my DNA, the environment and year I was born into, and the inevitable prospect of my death. Even my own previous choices are factical. These past choices which I cannot change are the background against which I exist in the present moment, and they limit my freedom.

Facticity can also change. I might have a factical situation where I am unable to read. However, if I am given the resources and I make the choices necessary to become literate, this facticity could be transformed.
The Infinite – The infinite represents possibility, the capacity to envisage new thoughts and ideas, bring into existence new creations, change oneself and choose from innumerable potentialities.

This is also known as transcendence for other existentialists. Primarily through the faculty of imagination, we as humans can go beyond what simply is toward what can be. The possible can transcend the factual. See this excellent passage in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the dichotomy between transcendence & facticity in existentialism.

Michael is too immersed in his own experience, Dwight is not immersed enough; Michael is too immanent and Dwight too transcendent. Dwight seems to have a kind of dissociated distance from others, from his world, and from the people around him. Michael is the opposite in many ways, as he is wholly immersed in a solipsistic fictional world he has constructed in which he is the primary character. Dwight is too finite, Michael too finite? I don’t know if that’s true, actually. Maybe both of them are in the same situation of being too finite. I’ll have to think more about that. Either way, both are inauthentic, in a mode of bad faith: they embracing one side of existence while rejecting another.

Inauthentic people – and by that, I mean people in general, because none of us are wholly authentic – use elaborate schemes to portray themselves in certain ways and ignore others. In The Office, these schemes are almost as obvious, hilarious, and pathetic as they are in the real world — the writers just point out how funny and cringey they are, usually through the lens of Jim or Pam. The writers of The Office express a perhaps unconscious understanding of the imperative for authenticity — just as Sartre urges us to reject our bad faith and recognize our freedom to escape any factical situation (which Dwight has difficulty understanding), and as Kierkegaard exhorts us to strike a balance between infinity and finitude (which Michael has difficult understanding). This is the existential wisdom of the show.

“The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is bound to be noticed.”
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

And with that unnecessary overanalysis, back to The Office.

Politics

What Matters in a President, and Why Electability Doesn’t

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date October 24, 2016

I’m not going to argue for any of the candidates in this post. That’ll come later. For now, I think there are three main factors that should be considered in a president. They are all interrelated, and in order of importance. However, if a candidate doesn’t meet any one of these criteria, it is practically impossible to meet any of the other criteria.

Character – This consists mostly of the the moral standards and honesty of the candidate. If I do not trust a candidate, their competence becomes irrelevant, as it will not be used ethically. Their positions become meaningless because they will abandon policy and ethical standards at will. Character also includes temperament and personality, as an angry, irrational, and unstable candidate is a danger to the world and ineffective in diplomacy.
Competence – The proven experience of the candidate, their intelligence, and their ability to implement policies effectively. If a candidate isn’t politically competent, their policies won’t matter because they will never be implemented. Intelligence is not measured by IQ, but by the candidate’s understanding of the world, their rationality, their education, and their working ability.
Policy – The stated positions of the candidate. If every candidate could be trusted to follow their policy statements exactly and implement them effectively, this would be the only issue. Despite its importance, policy is by far the least-discussed issue in this election.

On Electability

Electability, for me, is mostly a non-issue. Of course, a candidate must have some chance of becoming president, or we will be divided into minuscule factions and candidates will only have to win a small portion of the vote to take the election. However, “some chance” is a low margin. For example, Zoltan Istvan, the transhumanist candidate, is not on the ballot in any state and is not polling at more than 5% in any state (source). This is below the “some chance” margin, as 25 days from the election, he has no path to the presidency. However, Evan McMullin, an independent candidate, is on the ballot in 11 states (source), has a significant chance of winning Utah (source), and has a growing campaign nationally. If a candidate passes this minimum threshold of electability, we should move on and consider the three most important factors.

Our democratic obligation is to vote for the candidate we support. Otherwise, our system degrades and no longer represents the population, as the contemporary philosopher Slavoj Zizek described:

We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.

If we do not vote our conscience, we as a population fail to represent ourselves. We do not ‘throw our vote away’ when we vote for an unlikely candidate we genuinely support, rather, we throw our vote away when we do not vote what we believe. We are not voting for ourselves, but for someone else, for the polls, for the average. Popular opinion becomes the popular opinion of what the popular opinion is; democracy devolves into regressive guessing at the average. Furthermore, government is only legitimate when it represents the governed. When we do not represent ourselves, our government becomes illegitimate.

Finally, there are a ton of misconceptions about voting power in our democracy.

First, statistical analysis shows that, in general, your vote has the most power if you vote for a third-party candidate, not for a major party. I don’t really see the point of explaining this, as the linked post explains it very well. I’d definitely recommend reading it.

Second, the power of a single vote is extremely close to zero. This election, your vote will probably be around 1 in 125 million. Therefore, the best reason to vote is not really to control the election, but to represent ourselves. Don’t do it merely for the results; do it because you believe in your candidate.

Third, a lot of the time, your publicly expressed opinions matter more than your vote, because these opinions influence a significant amount of votes. Who you support actively matters more than who you vote for quietly.

Fourth, whether or not your candidate is elected is not the only measure of voting power. You could say all the Bernie Sanders votes this year were wasted because he didn’t win, but he still radically influenced the election and changed American politics permanently. Winning ≠ success.

Fifth, when you vote for a third party candidate, you break out of the mold. This draws attention far more than obediently voting for established candidates that adhere to the two-party system. Therefore, votes for a third party candidate are more influential than other votes.

That’s why I don’t think electability matters, and why don’t think it should matter. Vote your conscience this election.

Essays Philosophy

Why Philosophy Should Abandon the Metaphor of Light

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date June 27, 2016

One of the most commonplace images in philosophy and religion: a light in the darkness.

In the beginning, there was Plato’s cave. There, only shadows without recognizable form existed, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. A prisoner freed himself, and escaped into the light. And he saw the light, and that it was good, and he recognized the origin of the shadows. He returned to the cave of his imprisonment, and said: “Let there be light.”

Entrenched in the core of the Western tradition is the metaphorical narrative of light from the darkness. It is central both in religion, as in Genesis 1, and philosophy, as in Plato’s allegory of the cave. I merged these two narratives together to show their fundamental similarity. They describe a myth in which everything is covered in shadow until an enlightened being – God in Genesis and the escaped prisoner in Plato – brings light to the darkness. But where did this metaphor come from? What does it really mean? Is it a valuable metaphor for society, metaphysics, and epistemology? Should we keep it, modify it, or scrap it entirely?

A History of Light

The first metaphors of light occur in religious texts. The origin myth in the Rig Veda, a founding collection of Hindu verses written around 1500 B.C., sounds almost eerily similar to Genesis:

At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.
All this was only unillumined water. That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,
arose at last, born of the power of heat.
— The Rig Veda

However, this narrative has one crucial difference from the Bible. In the Rig Veda, one of the most ancient texts ever discovered, heat is the first to come into being, not light. This reveals that until the last century, light and heat were virtually synonymous, because almost all light was generated by fire or the sun. Light and heat are the essence of basic physical — and perhaps metaphysical — comfort. The warmth of the fire provided early humans a refuge from the terrors of the cold, menacing night. Most importantly, it protected us from the fear of blindness: the lack of knowledge, the paucity of seeing.

In our ancient history, we feared the night not because of the darkness itself, but due to what darkness was associated with: savage beasts, murder, losing one’s way. Over time, this dread became so fundamental that we became afraid of the night in itself. The absence of light, became a primary cause of fear, not a secondary terror associated with more dangerous prospects. It is no surprise, then, that the metaphor of light has become ingrained in the human psyche, a permanent relic of more dangerous times.

From the golden age of the Indus valley to the founding of Rome, the world’s major religions were hard at work solidifying the metaphorical position of light as good, truth, and piety. The Quran is dotted with the phrase “He bringeth them out of darkness into light.” In the Hebrew Bible, John 8:12 directly connects light to God and righteousness:

“When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light.”
The Bible, John 8:12

In religious iconography from nearly every sect, priests, prophets, and saints are distinguished by a halo of light of some kind.

The Buddha is represented with a halo of light in this ancient Chinese painting.

Muhammad leads the saints in prayer, surrounded by a mantle of light or fire.

Ra, the sun god of ancient Egypt, was almost always depicted with a solar disc on his head.

In Simon Ushakov’s icon of the The Last Supper (1685), Christ and all of the apostles except Judas Iscariot have a halo.

The Lighted Clearing: The Epistemology of the Enlightenment

The metaphor of light is not merely a decorative literary cliché. “Already in Plato,” writes Hans Blumenburg, “the metaphorics of light already has a metaphysics of light implicit in it.” The metaphor is at the core of the idea that the world submits itself to the light of reason. Without the language of light-dark duality, it would be challenging to formulate or understand enlightenment philosophy.

Light-dark dualism is connected with nearly every major European philosophical movement. In Greece, the birthplace of Western philosophy, the Sun was a god – Helios, “the Father of the piercing beams of light” (Pindar). Plato built upon the established iconography of light to represent his epistemology. In The Republic, light is knowledge, while darkness is ignorance. Daylight exposes the night’s filth, untruth, and vice, and therefore light is enlightenment and truth.

Centuries later, Descartes constructed the philosophical meaning of “the natural light of reason,” a phrase coined by Cicero. This light alone, said Descartes, can intuit truth beyond doubt, as it is disconnected from the senses and the corporeal world. He writes:

…for I cannot doubt that which the natural light causes me to believe to be true, as, for example, it has shown me that I am from the fact that I doubt, or other facts of the same kind. And I possess no other faculty whereby to distinguish truth. from falsehood, which can teach me that what this light shows me to be true is not really true, and no other faculty that is equally trustworthy.
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, pg. 14

This light, the lumen naturale, is the intuition of truth. Descartes recognizes that reason is not always a meticulous logical process. Often, he writes, it is simply a powerful intuition, a “spontaneous inclination.” We feel the logical coherence of certain truths, and we feel dissonance if we reject these truths. He recognizes the flaws of this intuition, but ultimately accepts it as the only method for discovering reality. In the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes that truth cannot escape the light of reason:

Nothing here can escape us, because what reason brings forth entirely out of itself cannot be hidden, but is brought to light by reason itself as soon as reason’s common principle has been discovered.

In short, the radiance of reason exposes all knowable things.

Later in the history of light, Heidegger uses the lichtung, or lighted clearing, as the location where being is disclosed. Lichtung, writes Heidegger, “designates a bringing to light which is also a clearing of space” (Garbutt). In the lichtung, truths are revealed. It is a site of revelation and exposure, where our inner selves can no longer be hidden.

Therefore, most philosophical figures of the Western tradition, including Kant, Plato, Heidegger and Descartes, use a conception of truth best described by the ancient Greek word for truth, alethia, which means “unconcealment.” This perspective assumes that everything can be illuminated by light or grasped by reason. This epistemology’s foundations are attacked as the postmodernist movement comes into its own.

The Collapse of the Metaphor of Light

In the 20th century, postmodern philosophers like Levinas and Derrida recognized that the world is not completely intelligible. By contesting the most fundamental imagery of the Platonic legacy, they are counter-philosophical (Sparrow). These deconstructionists are Simba in the Lion King. They are told that philosophy can understand all that the light touches, but this does not satisfy them. Exploring the borders of the epistemology they inherited, the postmodernists reach the edge of the kingdom and realize that there is existence in shadow and darkness.

The totalizing vision of the Western tradition restricts truth and reality to objects that fit the understandable mold of reason:

“what does not enter into form is banished from this world”
(Levinas 1).

This vision fails to see that the light of reason can only reveal objective knowledge. The Enlightenment framework assumes that because reason can only understand objective knowledge, objectivity is the only kind of knowledge. In this way, the Platonic legacy ignores subjectivity. Ironically, the disciples of Enlightenment epistemology are like the prisoners of Plato’s cave – they assume that what they can see is all that exists.

On the other hand, Levinas understood that the most basic fact of our relation with other people is that we cannot understand other people. This is alterity: the infinite otherness of everyone we know. To live is to come into contact with other beings that are fundamentally alien to us, to encounter another consciousness that “wells up inside of us to disrupt and menace the smooth operation of the intellect and the cultivation of a solipsistic identity” (Sparrow). Here, Pythagoras is relevant – in his writings, light represents limits, while darkness is infinity – shadow is associated “with the unexplored, indefinite interior” (Notopulos). Our world, then, is better represented by a dark forest than a lighted clearing. I am subjectivity and I live in the midst of subjectivity – all around me are unexplored selves, and I am an unexplored self.

Derrida made a more political criticism of light-dark dualism. In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the protagonist, Winston, is told he will meet his fellow resistor in “a place where there is no darkness.” He did not know what this meant, “only that in some way or another it would come true.” In the end, oppressive and all-powerful Party imprisons Winston in a cell where inescapable artificial light tortures him for all hours of the day. This demonstrates the political meaning of light as what allows beings to be revealed, manipulated, controlled, and used as tools toward an end. As Derrida wrote:

…the entire philosophical tradition, in its meaning and at bottom, would make common cause with oppression and with the totalitarianism of the same. The ancient clandestine friendship between light and power, the ancient complicity between theoretical objectivity and techno-political possession.
Violence and Metaphysics, pg 91

Derrida argues that the state cannot possess humans if they do not have the philosophy to justify their act of ownership. This justifying philosophy is the Enlightenment, which views subjectivity as penetrable to reason, and thus open to ownership. Light exposes objects so they can be used, while “A philosophy of the night recognizes that form disintegrates in the darkness, objects lose their graspability” (Sparrow).

In absolute visibility, humans become objects. As Foucalt might say, an anatomy textbook exposes the human body completely, which makes the body seem like an object that can be understood if we simply comprehend all the cells that compose it. If we view others in this way, what is the moral significance of owning a human? The state seems to say, a citizen is merely a beast of labor with a different conformation of cells. In reality, we do not encounter the Other as an object, but as an infinite force outside ourselves, with a subjectivity we cannot fully comprehend.

The traditional metaphor of light has failed philosophy. It collapses the moment we step away from our solitary philosophizing and into the world of others. The ancient need to expose, objectify, disclose, and grasp subjectivity causes us to ignore any realities which escape our attempt to understand. We should replace this all-exposing worldview with a philosophy of night that recognizes uncertainty and alterity.

Update: 4/7/20

I originally wrote this post when I was 16. Looking back on it, I’m proud of my intuitions. I still stick by them. I realize that I converged with Laurelle, the non-philosopher. They’re expressed in this (warning – spooky) video, based on Laurelle’s Of Black Universe in the Human Foundations of Color. Thank you to Trent Knebel for introducing me to this work. Laruelle has written here what might constitute a manifesto for the philosophy of night:

A video oratory on Laruelle’s Black Universe.

In the beginning there is Black–man and Universe, rather than philosopher and World…
Surrounding the philosopher everything becomes World and light. Surrounding man everything becomes Universe and opacity…
Light strikes the Earth with repeated blows, divides the World infinitely, solicits in vain the invisible Universe…
Man approaches the World only by way of transcendental darkness, into which he never entered and from which he will never leave…
Black is without opposite: even light, which tries to turn it into its opposite, fails in the face of the rigor of its secret….
Our uchromia: to learn to think from the point of view of Black as what determines color in the last instance rather than what limits it.
Philosophical technology has been withdrawn mimetically from the World, in order to reflect and reproduce it. Such technology is inadequate for thinking the Universe…
Our philosophers are children who are afraid of the Dark…
Philosophy is thinking by way of a generalized “black box”; it is the effort to fit black into light and to push it back to the rear of the caverns…
François Laruelle, founder of non-philosophy

While I don’t claim to understand the full theoretical dimensions of Laruelle’s works, I agree with his intuitions. So even if he has a hard time expressing what he means in clean, terse, and logical philosophical prose (and I’m sure he’s easier to understand if you know French and can read him in his native language), I forgive him because I think he’s got the core ideas right. He’s gesturing at what Nietzsche called das ur-Eine, the primordial unity; the dark, inaccessible, opaque, contradictory nature of the Real which underlies and composes our existence.

Works Cited

Descartes, René. "Meditations on First Philosophy." Indianapolis: Hacket Press. 2000. Print. 

Garbutt, Robert. "The Clearing: Heidegger's Lichtung and the Big Scrub." Southern Cross University. 2010. Print. 

Levinas, Immanuel. "Phenomenon and Enigma." Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. Page 70. 

Notopoulos, James. "The Symbolism of the Sun and Light in the Republic of Plato." Classical Philology, Vol. 39, No. 3. Pp. 163-172. University of Chicago Press. 1994. Print. 

Pindar. "The Odes of Pindar." The University of Chicago Press. 1947. Print. 

Sparrow, Tom. "Levinas Unhinged." John Hunt Publishing. 28 Jun 2013. Print.

Essays

A Comprehensive Demonstration of the Harms of Mass Surveillance

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date January 24, 2015

Composed by Logan Norris, Jeremy Hadfield, Sean Robinson, and Gabrielle Garner

For the International Public Policy Forum

On the topic Resolved: Mass surveillance is not a justified method of governmental intelligence gathering.

“The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.” – G.K. Chesterton

Mass surveillance pervades every aspect of life in the digital age. The global surveillance network, codenamed ECHELON, has fifteen cooperating states and an extensive web of corporate ties and participating programs (Nabbali 2004). These ever-vigilant programs collect trillions of communications annually (Taylor 2014), can now monitor over 75% of the internet (Gorman 2013), and are expanding at a shockingly rapid pace (Von Drehle 2013). There are 30 million surveillance cameras deployed in the United States alone, shooting 4 billion hours of footage every week (Vlahos 2014). John Villesenor recognizes the significance of this: “We are crossing a threshold that has never been crossed in all of human history. It has become possible – even easy…to essentially document everything that has been said and done,” (Goodspeed 2012). Often, the damage that this surveillance creates is downplayed (Heller 2014). It is vital that society recognizes the long-term impacts and consequences of mass surveillance, from the collapse of people-ruled societies to the promotion of conformity, and that its claims at meager benefits are not sufficient to justify its use.

Framework and definitions:

Justified is defined as shown to be right or reasonable (Merriam Webster 2014). Three tenets that must be adhered to establish justification:

Because mass surveillance is used on an international level, international laws, as represented by the International Covenant on Civil Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, must be adhered to.
In accordance with the UN’s interpretation, mass surveillance can only be justified if it is proportionate and necessary. If mass surveillance is abused in most cases then it is not justified.
A cost-benefit analysis, weighing harms and benefits against one another, will be used to determine justification. A cost-benefit analysis is the most useful way to measure the justification of an action (Kee 2014).

Mass Surveillance is defined as the pervasive surveillance of an entire or substantial fraction of a population. Surveillance is usually carried out by governments but may also be done by corporations at the behest of governments (U.S. Legal 2014). Mass surveillance can be accomplished through advanced technologies or through spying and police organizations (Cornelius 2004).

Mass surveillance increases state opacity and leads to oppression:

“[A] democratic system demands that government be transparent and accountable to the people, not the other way around.” – American Civil Liberties Union

There is not a single country in the world that has a fully transparent surveillance program (Greenwald 2014). With mass surveillance, governments make the affairs of their people completely translucent while they are bound by no standard of openness themselves. These omniscient overseers are free to conduct whatever sort of search that pleases them – unrestricted by the people and behind thorough bulwarks of secrecy.

Mass surveillance programs throughout the world have sacrificed their translucency to prevent national security secrets from entering the public domain. The NSA constructed a highly secretive court, in which “the hearings are closed to the public and the rulings of the judges are classified, and rarely released after the fact,” (O’Neill 2014). The link between mass surveillance and opacity is also evidenced by the increasing opacity of the United States government after the growth of NSA surveillance. In 2013, a record percentage of Freedom of Information Act requests for government files were denied (Bridis 2014). Almost all of the refusals originated from the Defense Department.

Countries such as the United States often hire private contractors to carry out their surveillance work. Currently, 70% of the NSA’s budget goes towards hiring private contractors (Cohen 2013). While the practice is profitable, it reduces transparency, as it is harder to track the work of the contractors and determine whether their work is justified (Thiessen 2013). The people have no oversight or power over these contractors (Goldman 2014).

When there is no oversight over or disclosure about mass surveillance, it’s impossible for the people to make an informed decision about or check the powers of surveillance programs. As James Madison wrote, “a popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both.” Unchecked government power leads to dangerous excess; power must be checked at every turn, the overwhelming evidence of history teaches us, or people will be abused. Countless regimes have perpetrated mass oppression and genocide because they were not checked by the people (Rummel 1993).

The abuse of systems of mass surveillance

Mass surveillance clearly breaks international law. A report given by the UN found that “the States engaging in mass surveillance have so far failed to provide…public justification for its necessity, and almost no States have enacted explicit domestic legislation to authorize its use” (Greenwald 2014).

Furthermore, the harms of a mass surveillance society outweigh the benefits, not just in America, but across the globe. Countries with endemic mass surveillance, such as China, North Korea, Iran, and East Germany give us a lucid view into the detrimental effects of mass surveillance.

In North Korea, citizens are under constant surveillance (France-Presse 2012). Authorities use an extensive network of informants that report individuals they suspect of subversive behavior (HRW 2014). North Korea uses this network to imprison anyone who practices free speech, political opposition, association, petition, or media representation (Winslow 2014). Mass surveillance has allowed North Korea to imprison over 200,000 in concentration camps with a 40% death rate (Amnesty International 2011). Instead of preventing terrorist attacks, mass surveillance turns governments themselves into terrorists that use technology to subjugate their citizens.

Iran has been christened one of the “State Enemies of the Internet” because of its drastic measures of mass surveillance (Reporters Without Borders 2013). Using various digital forms of surveillance (Alimardani 2014), Iran gravely violates the freedom of information and multiple human rights (Reporters Without Borders 2013). Iran has used mass surveillance methods such as the wiretapping of phones and the monitoring of Internet activity against critics of the Iranian regime (Reuters 2012). Saleh Hamid was beaten with an iron bar by Iranian security agents who claimed that he was spreading propaganda against the regime, using Saleh’s own phone calls as evidence (Stecklow 2012). Anyone who is claimed to be a threat to the authoritarian government may be arrested and sent to Iran’s infamous Evin prison. Journalists, intellectuals, netizens and dissidents are held there for undisclosed amounts of time (Amnesty International 2014). Brutal conditions and horrendous interrogation procedures make Evin a “hell on earth” (Chiaramonte 2013).

China uses its mass surveillance, including over 30 million security cameras, to “crush its critics” (Langfit 2013). China has enacted legislation to secretly hold dissidents who challenge the Communist party (Buckley 2012). The regime used surveillance techniques to find activists and torture them for months in the name of ‘security’ (Lei 2012). For example, Ai Weiwei was held for three months and brutally beaten for speaking against the government (Foster 2014). China now monitors nearly every conversation to intimidate citizens into obedience (Langfit 2013). Chinese security agents can turn cellphones into listening devices, and Li Tiantian, a human rights lawyer in Shanghai, said that they eavesdropped on her conversations to track her movements and arrest her (Langfit 2013).

These despotic surveillance states are unnervingly similar to Western nations that are thought to be more exemplary. Documents reveal that UK and US surveillance agencies have manipulated online discourse in their favor with tactics of deception and repression, infiltrating activist groups with no conceivable connection to terrorism (Aevin 2014). They have targeted political candidates, activists, academics and lawyers (Aaron 2014). Muslim leaders who live exemplary lives have been subjecte

d to intense scrutiny (Greenwald 2014). This surveillance is used to coerce and oppress. For example, in 1963, the FBI sent a letter to Martin Luther King Jr., requiring him to commit suicide to prevent personal information that had been obtained through mass surveillance from being publicized (Corn 2013). Surveillance programs are also used for sheer voyeurism – one NSA employee spied on nine women for six years (Lewis 2013).

As it is used to abuse and silence entire populations, governmental intelligence gathering represents an implement of oppression rather than a benefit.

How surveillance breeds conformity

A substantial literature manifests that surveillance breeds conformity, silences dissent from state policies, inhibits creativity, and stifles intellectual freedom (Roche 2014; Tolstedt 1984). Using mass surveillance, governments have the power to see how long someone’s attention lingers on a webpage, how she expresses herself in communications, and what kinds of ideas she is being exposed to. This comprehensive data about our virtual persona means that intelligence agencies have an incredibly pellucid view of our minds, second, perhaps, to only ourselves.

One study (“Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self-Censor,” 2014) surveyed over 520 writers, and found that because of surveillance, 14% refrained from visiting controversial or suspicious websites, 27% expressed reluctance to write or speak about certain subjects, and 40% were averse to participating in social media. Another inquiry into the effects of surveillance on Internet search behavior revealed a significant decline in searches for sensitive terms after the NSA was publicized (Marthews and Tucker 2014).

These results demonstrate that without the option of privacy, individuals self-censor; they do not express dissenting views, voice opinions, or challenge the status quo. Thus, surveillance is more dangerous, if subtler, than censorship, the removal of an idea after it is expressed: it prevents ideas from ever being expressed. Free minds are key to free societies; anyone must be able to present their conception of the truth (Richards 2013), and surveillance places fetters on the mind, reinforcing compliance to the state and the imperative to act in obedience to norms (Greenwald 2012). This is illustrated by those societies that have fully invested in mass surveillance, such as North Korea, where individuals entirely conform to the government because of its all-seeing surveillance. As Edward Snowden remarked, “Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.”

The crippling psychological effects of a watched society are demonstrated by totalitarian nations. A watched society coincides more with a fear-instilling totalitarian regime stripped of rights than a free government. Such regimes have decreased life expectancies, economic growth, and stability. According to Harvard University, citizens in totalitarian regimes experience less individual liberty and political stability; chances of a finishing secondary school are 40% lower, infant mortality is 25% higher, and agricultural yields are 25% fewer. Totalitarian regimes are also more likely to exacerbate terrorism and end up in a perpetual cycle of violence and war (Siegle 2005).

Mass surveillance undermines societies

A variety of behaviors key for maintaining functioning societies, such as involvement, cooperation, and well-connected relationships, are undermined by mass surveillance. In post-WWII East Germany, the surveillance agency known as the Stasi established a society where every seventh individual was an informant (Koehler 1999). Here, a single informant was associated with a 10% decrease in organizational involvement (Jacob 2010). The surveillance also had a strong negative effect on social connectivity. In addition, the effects of surveillance remain today: there is a significant economic disparity between East and West Germany, as evidenced by unemployment rates: 13.5% in the East and only 7.2% in the West. This significant imbalance owes to the lingering deficiency in cooperation that is ultimately traced to the Stasi regime’s crushing surveillance (Jacob 2010).

Not only does surveillance damage relationships between individuals, it erodes trust between the state and the people, and between private companies and their customers. This is empirically supported by the explosion of distrust and mass protest that followed the release of the “Snowden files” in the United States (Osborne 2013).

Furthermore, surveillance’s eradication of trust has harmed the economy, especially technological companies. The cloud computing industry alone will lose $35 billion by 2016, and the total profits foregone due to surveillance will be almost $180 billion (Miller 2014). Draconian mass surveillance represses creativity and reduces productivity in workplaces, and both of these are key drivers of the economy (Ovsey 2014). Microsoft labels government snooping an “advanced persistent threat,” a term usually applied to malicious hackers. Experts in technology and the internet are deeply concerned that trust will deteriorate in the wake of mass surveillance (Anderson 2014). Surveillance has also weakened computer systems to gain access to their data, which has harmed the systems comprehensively to great effect on the economy (Holder 2014).

The U.S. has seen a growing controversy regarding its inability to separate systems of mass surveillance from independent legal matters. While many countries preach that mass surveillance is only used to thwart terrorist operations, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit and the FBI have admitted that nearly 250 arrests have been made with illegally obtained information, and that they were instructed to lie about its origin (Shiffman 2013). This highlights an example of constitutional abuse and slippery illegal activity that is not proportional or necessary, reminiscent to the despotic Stasi, which expanded into jobs meant for other sectors of the government, “in essence becoming a state within a state” (Knabe 2014). The NSA now has more than 55,000 employees (not including private contractors), as compared to the Stasi’s 91,000 (Groll 2013).

Mass surveillance is impotent and counterproductive:

The unprecedented and brutal rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria begs the question: why didn’t the almost completely unhindered surveillance programs of Western nations detect the growing militant movement? The mass gathering of metadata has so far yielded no noteworthy assistance in the effort against the Islamic State, even though it uses the Internet to communicate (Pye 2013). The answer is simple: mass surveillance is inept, and it is even harmful to national security and efforts against terrorism.

An inquiry by the Review Group of the U.S. Federal Government failed to find a single case in which metadata collection provided crucial information in a terrorism investigation (Richardson 2014). In addition, the New America Foundation investigated 54 commonly cited NSA ‘successes’, and found that the agency “played an identifiable role in initiating, at most, 1.8% of these cases” (Bergen et al 2014). NSA director Keith Alexander has admitted that there has been only one terrorist plot in which mass surveillance played a significant role (Brinkerhoff 2013). Government claims about the NSA’s success have repeatedly been shown to be false (Beauchamp 2014).

Private contractors hired by surveillance agencies are not supervised, and thus the national security secrets they manage are at extreme risk. If they release information, it can be exploited by foreign actors for malicious ends. Edward Snowden, who worked for a private contractor, released national security secrets that have been stolen by Russia and China and are now an enormous threat (Dreyfuss 2013).

Moreover, one of the central devices to the rhetoric of those who support mass surveillance is that it will prevent the horrors of terrorist attacks like 9/11 from ever happening again. However, the intensive accumulation of data would not have stopped these massacres, as they resulted from “a failure to connect the dots, not a failure to collect enough dots,” (Medine 2014). Hijacker Khalid al-Midhar’s phone calls to other conspirators were listened to, but intelligence agencies failed to recognize their significance, despite repeated opportunities (Elliot and Meyer 2014). In fact, the sheer amount of data collected by mass surveillance would probably result in the communications between hijackers being lost (Kopstein 2014).

In addition, mass surveillance is, in several ways, counterproductive. Surveillance programs often hack encrypted communications and install ‘back doors’ in internet programs (Sasso 2014). These back doors can be opened by cyberterrorists, allowing them to utilize the government’s methods to wreak catastrophe to the economy and national security of the nation in question. Inserting backdoors, sabotaging standards, and tapping commercial data centers provide malicious actors opportunities to exploit the resulting vulnerabilities (Schneier 2014). With the onset of backdoors created by the NSA, there has been a seventeen-fold increase in the amount of cyberterrorist attacks against the United States (Goldsmith 2013).

Counter-terrorism efforts have been paralyzed by mass surveillance. Knowing of surveillance programs, terrorists have changed their communication patterns to avoid them (Starr 2014). This causes them to “go dark” on surveillance radar, and makes security programs blind to defend against their attacks (Yost 2014).

Furthermore, the abrasion of trust caused by mass surveillance is damaging to counter-terrorist efforts. The recent monitoring of German chancellor Angela Merkel undermined the central pillar of diplomacy: trust (Jeffries 2013). Surveillance demonstrates to Europeans that the U.S. does not act in their interests, but only to further its own international power (Knigge 2013). A strong European-American alliance has been crucial to combating terrorism and working towards stability in the Middle East (Mauer and Möckli 2013). Damaging that alliance will allow terrorism to expand in this already-chaotic area. This is not only an issue of transatlantic diplomacy, however. The injury of trust that surveillance causes will harm relations between all states, leading to an increase in scuffles and perhaps even wars, and thwarting progress towards agreement and peace.

Furthermore, the strategy of mass surveillance is ineffective, as it means that insights are neglected and the amount of spurious correlations found multiplies (Guillart 2014). A small and highly contextual level allows for far more effective intelligence gathering, with fewer mistakes and more results (Friedersdorf 2014). Mass surveillance has had remarkably few successes despite, or perhaps because of, its immense pool of data.

Conclusion

The inherent nature, negative results, and dysfunctionality of mass surveillance render it a thoroughly unjustified method for governmental intelligence gathering. Mass surveillance requires an opaque and unchecked government that inevitably begins to abuse the rights of its people. It negatively affects the behaviors and relationships of individuals, states, and companies. It is and has been used by international governments to oppress their people. It leads to a collapse of trust and a subsequent fallout in international relations, obstructing the struggle for peace and against terrorism; bolsters conformity; and undermines economic relationships, leading to a decline in overall affluence. Finally, mass surveillance is an impotent and counterproductive strategy of intelligence gathering.

Works Cited

Aaron, Craig. “The Unchecked Spying Needs to Stop.” Free Press. 9 Jul 2014. Web. Accessed 17 Oct 2014. <http://www.freepress.net/blog/2014/07/09/unchecked-spying-needs-stop>

Aalto University. “Negative effects of computerized surveillance at home: Cause of annoyance, concern, anxiety, and even anger.” ScienceDaily. 8 October 2012. Web. Accessed 17 Oct..

ACLU. “Rein in the Surveillance State.” American Civil Liberties Union. Web. Accessed Oct 17 <https://www.aclu.org/rein-surveillance-state>

Amnesty International. “Iran must investigate ‘Black Thursday’ brutality at Evin Prison.” Amnesty.org. 15 May 2014. Web. 11 Jan 2015.

Amnesty International. “End horror of North Korean political prison camps.” 04 May. 2011. Web. 21 October. 2014. <http://www.amnesty.org/en/appeals-for-action/north-korean-political-prison-camps>

Anderson, Janna and Rainie, Lee. “Net Threats: Experts say internet is challenged by state surveillance.” Pew Research Center – Internet Project. 3 July 2014. Web. Accessed 18 Oct 2014. <http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/07/03/net-threats/>

Alimardani, Mahsa. “Iran on the Day to End Mass Surveillance in Iran.” Global Voices
Advocacy. 11 Feb 2014. Web. 11 Jan 2015. <http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/
2014/02/11/iran-on-the-day-to-end-mass-surveillance>

Aevin, Craig. “New Snowden Documents Reveal that Governments are ‘Attempting to Control, Infiltrate, and Manipulate, and Warp Online Discourse.” WashingtonsBlog. 25 Feb 2014. Web. 11 Jan 2015. <http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/02/british-spy-agency.html>

Buckley, Chris. “China parliament unveils dissident detention powers.” Reuters. 8 March Web. 21 October 2014. <reuters.com/article/2012/03/08/us-china-npc-law-idUSBRE8270BP20120308>

Bridis, Ted.“US Cites Security More to Censor, Deny Records.” The Big Story – Associated Press. 3 September 2013. Web. Accessed 16 Oct 2014. <http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-cites-security-more-censor-deny-records>

Bergen, Peter et al. “Do NSA’s bulk surveillance programs stop terrorists?” New America Foundation. Jan 2014. Web. Accessed 18 Oct 2014. <http://www.newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/Bergen_NAF_NSA%20Surveillance_1_0.pdf>

Beauchamp, Zack. “5 Revealing Facts From the Sweeping New Study of NSA Surveillance.” Jan 13 2014. Web. 11 Jan 2014.

Brinkerhoff, Noel. “NSA Director Alexander Admits He Lied About Phone Surveillance About Stopping 54 Terrorist Attacks.” AllGov.com. 7 Oct 2013. Web. Accessed 18 Oct 2014. <http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/nsa-director-alexander-admits-he-lied-about-phone-surveillance-stopping-54-terror-plots-131007?news=851326

Chiaramonte, Perry. “Hell on Earth: Inside Iran’s brutal Evin prison.” Fox News. 28 January.
2013. Web. 21 October 2014. <http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/01/28/inside -evin-look-at-world-most-notorious-political-prison/>

“Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self-Censor.” PEN America. Research Conducted by the FDR Group. 12 Nov 2013. Web. Accessed 17 Oct 2014.<http://www.pen.org/sites/default/files/Chilling%20Effects_PEN%20American.pdf>

Cohen, Andrew. “Privacy Expert Hoofnagle Analyzes Implications of NSA Surveillance.”Berkeley Law. 5 July. 2013. Web. 10 October 2014.<http://www.law.berkeley.edu/15551.htm>

Corn, David. “Dark Side of ‘I Have a Dream’: The FBI’s War on Martin Luther King.” Mother Jones. 28 Aug 2013. Web. Accessed 17 Oct 2014. <http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/j-edgar-hoover-war-martin-luther-king>

Cornelius, Kai. “Vom spurlosen Verschwindenlassen zur Benachrichtigungspflicht bei Festnahmen.” Berlin BMV. 2004. Web. 10 October 2014.

Wong, Cynthia. “A Clear-Eyed Look at Mass Surveillance.” Human Rights Watch. 25 July 2014. Web. 11 Jan 2015.
DailyNK. “The Secret of the North Korean Regime’s Surprising Resilience”. 12 December. Web. 10 October 2014 <http://www.dailynk.com/english/keys/2000/1/09.php>

Dreyfuss, Bob. “Did Russia, China Harvest Snowden’s Secrets?” The Nation. 25 Jun 2013. Web. 11 Jan 2015. <http://www.thenation.com/blog/174983/did-russia-china-harvest-snowdens-secrets>

Elliot, Justin and Meyer, Theodoric. “Claim on ‘Attacks Thwarted’ by NSA Spreads Despite Lack of Evidence.” ProPublica. 23 Oct 2013. Web. Accessed 18 Oct 2014. <http://www.propublica.org/article/claim-on-attacks-thwarted-by-nsa-spreads-despite-lack-of-evidence>

France-Presse, Agence. “Massive police state controls North Korea: study.” The Raw Story. 19 July. 2012. Web. 15 October. 2014.<http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/massive-police-state-controls-north-korea-study/>

Friedersdorf, Conor. “No Place To Hide: A Conservative Critique of the Radical NSA.” 14 May
Web. Accessed 18 Oct 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/
2014/05/on-nsa-surveillance-glenn-greenwald-is-not-the-radical/370830/>

Foster, Peter. “China’s Ai Weiwei Speaks Out Over Activist’s Detentions on Twitter.” The Telegraph. 9 Aug 2014. Web. 8 Jan 2015.<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8691475/Chinas-Ai-Weiwei-sp eaks-out-over-activists-detentions-on-Twitter.htm>

Greenwald, Glenn & Hussain, Murtaza. “Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On.” The Intercept. 8 Sep 2014. Web. Accessed 17 Oct 2014. <https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/09/under-surveillance/>

Greenwald, Glenn. “How America’s Surveillance State Breeds Conformity and Fear.” AlterNet.org. 4 Jul 2012. Transcript of Speech – Web. Accessed 17 Oct 2014. <http://tinyurl.com/clfnle3>

Gouillart, Francis. “Big data NSA spying is not even an effective strategy.” Fortune. 10 Jun Web. Accessed 19 Oct 2014. http://fortune.com/2013/06/10/big-data-nsa-spying -is-not-even-an-effective-strategy/

Goldman, Adam. “NSA Leak Highlights key role of Private Contractors.” Huffington Post. 10 June. 2013. Web. 12 October. 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/nsa-leak-contractors_n_3418876.html

Gorman, Siohban and Valentino-Devries, Jennifer. “New Details Show Broader NSA Surveillance Reach – Programs Cover 75% of Nation’s Traffic, Can Snare Emails.” Wall Street Journal. 20 Aug 2013. Web. Accessed 16 Oct 2014. <http://tinyurl.com/n7gl7zx>

Goodspeed, Peter. “Goodspeed Analysis: The Arab Spring may have helped usher in a new era of government surveillance.” National Post – Full Comment. 21 Apr 2012. Web. Accessed 17 Oct 2014. <http://tinyurl.com/villesenor12>

Groll, Elias. “By the numbers: The NSA’s super-secret spy program, PRISM.” Foreign Policy. 7 June 2013. Web. 11 Jan 2015. <http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/06/07/by-the-numbers-the-nsas-super-secret-spy-program-prism/>

Heller, Matthew. “Government Downplaying Sensitivity of Metadata Collected by NSA.” Mint Press News. 24 June 2014. Web. Accessed 16 Oct 2014. <http://www.mintpressnews.com/government-downplaying-sensitivity-of-metadata-collected-by-nsa/192810/>

Holder, Jonathan. “4 Ways That Mass Surveillance Destroys the Economy.” WashingtonsBlog. 29 June 2014. Web. 11 Jan 2015 <http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/06/surveillance-makes-us-poor.html>

Jeffries, Adrianne. “US has been monitoring German chancellor Angela Merkel since 2002, report says.” The Verge. Oct 2013. Web. Accessed 18 Oct 2014. <http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/26/5031990/us-has-been-monitoring-german-chancellor-angela-merkels-phone-since-2002>

Jacob, Marcus. “The legacy of Surveillance: An Explanation for Social Capital Erosion and the Persistent Economic Disparity Between East and West Germany” European Business School Oestrich-Winkel and Harvard University. 17 March. 2010. Web. 21 October 2014 <http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic718237.files/JacobTyrell_Surveillance%20Social%20Capital%20Economic%20Performance.pdf>

Kee, James. “Cost- Effectiveness and Cost-Benefit Analysis.” Handbook of Practical Program Evaluation. 10 June 2010. Web. 25 October 2014.<http://home.gwu.edu/~scellini/CelliniKee21.pdf>

Knabe, Hubertus. “The dark secrets of a surveillance state” TED. June. 2014. Web. 21 October 2014. <http://www.ted.com/talks/hubertus_knabe_the_dark_secrets_of_a_surveillance_state?language=en>

Knigge, Michael. “NSA Surveillance Eroded Transatlantic Trust.” Duetsche Welle. 27 Dec Web. Accessed 18 Oct 2014. <http://www.dw.de/nsa-surveillance-eroded-transatlantic-trust/a-17311216>

Kopstein, Joshua. “The NSA Can ‘Collect-it-All,’ But What Will It Do With Our Data Next?” The Daily Beast. 16 Mar 2014. Web. Accessed 18 Oct 2014. <http://www.thedailybeast.com//2014/05/16/the-nsa-can-collect-it-all-but-what-will-it-do-with-our-data-next.html>

Koehler, John. “The untold story of the East German Secret Police” Westview Press, 1999. Web. 15 October. 2014. <https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/koehler-stasi.html>

Langfit, Frank. “In China, Beware: A Camera May Be Watching You.” NPR. 29 January. 2013. Web. 21 October. 2014 <http://www.npr.org/2013/01/29/170469038/
in-china-beware-a-camera-may-be-watching-you>

Lei, Alexis. “Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei places himself under home surveillance” CNN, 2012. Web. 21 October. 2014 <http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/04/world/asia/ai-weiwei-webcams/>

Lewis, Paul. “NSA Employee spied on nine women without detection, internal file shows.” The Guardian. 27 Sep 2014. Web. 11 Jan 2015.

Matthews, Alex and Tucker, Catherine. “Government Surveillance and Internet Search Behavior.” Social Science Research Network. 18 Aug 2014. Web. Accessed 17 Oct 2014. <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2412564>

Madison, James. “Securing the Republic: James Madison to W.T. Barry.” The Founder’s Constitution. 4 Aug 1822. Uploaded Print. Accessed 17 Oct 2014.<http://presspubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch18s35.html>

Mauer, Victor and Möckli, Daniel. “European-American Relations and the Middle East: From Suez to Iraq.” Routledge Publishing. 23 July 2012. Print.

Miller, Claire. “Revelations of NSA Spying Cost U.S. Tech Companies.” New York Times. 21 March 2014. Web. Accessed 18 Oct 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/business/fallout-from-snowden-hurting-bottom-line-of-tech-companies.html?_r=0

Makino, Yoshihiro. “Inside Pyongyang (1): Kim Jong Un’s dictatorship intensifies in North
Korea”. The Asahi Shimbun: Asia and Japan Watch. 28 January. 2014. Web. 16 November 2014 <http://ajw.asahi.com/article/asia/korean_peninsula/AJ201401280009>

Moglen, Eben. “Privacy under attack: the NSA files revealed new threats to democracy”. The Guardian. 27 May. 2014. Web. 20 October. 2014.<http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/-sp-privacy-under-attack-nsa-files-revealed-new-threats-democracy>

Medine, David. “Report on the Telephone Records Program Conducted under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and on the Operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.” Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. 23 Jan 2014. Web. Accessed 18 Oct 2014. <https://www.eff.org/files/2014/01/23/final_report_1-23-14.pdf>

Merriam-Webster. “Definition of Justified.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary. 2014. Web. 11 Jan 2015. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/justify>

Nabbali, Talitha. “Going for the Throat: Carnivore in an ECHELON World – Part II.” Computer Law and Security Review. Pg. 84-97. 13 Mar 2004. Web. Accessed 16 Oct 2014. <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1974304>

Osborne, Louise. “Europeans outraged after NSA spying, threaten action.” USA Today. 29 Oct
Web. 7 Jan 2015 <http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/10/28/report-nsa-spain/3284609/>

O’Neill, Ben. “FISA, the NSA, and America’s Secret Court System.” Ludwig von Mises Institute. 22 Feb 2014. Web. Accessed 17 Oct 2014.<http://mises.org/daily/6672/FISA-the-NSA-and-Americas-Secret-Court-System>

Ovsey, Dan. “Beware! Big Brother culture will have adverse effect on creativity, productivity.” Financial Post. 26 Feb 2014. Web. 11 Jan 2015.

Pye, Jason. “Obama’s NSA completely missed the rise of Islamic militants in Iraq.” United Liberty. 17 Jun 2014. Web. Accessed 18 Oct 2014. <http://tinyurl.com/ISISpye2014>

Rummel, R.J. “Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurders: An Annotated Bibliography.” University of Hawaii System. 3 Jul 1993. Web. Accessed 17 Oct 2014. <https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/CHARNY.CHAP.HTM>

Richards, Neil M. “The Dangers of Surveillance.” Harvard Law Review. 20 May 2013. Web. Accessed 17 Oct 2014. <http://tinyurl.com/richards2013>

Richardson, Michelle. “The Nine Things You Should Know About the NSA RecommendationsFrom the President’s Review Group.” American Civil Liberties Union. 20 Dec 2013.Web. Accessed 18 Oct 2014. <https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology -and-liberty/10-things-you-should-know-about-nsa-recommendations>

Roche, Jason. “Surveillance Empowers Conformity [A Review of the Psychological Literature].” The Massachusetts Daily Collegian. 20 Feb 2014. Web. Accessed 17 Oct 2014. <http://dailycollegian.com/2014/02/20/surveillance-empowers-conformity/>

Reporters Without Borders. “Enemies of the Internet 2014: entities at the heart of censorship and surveillance.” Reporters Without Borders: For Freedom of Information. 2014. Web. 18 October. 2014. <http://12mars.rsf.org/2014-en/enemies-of-the-internet-2014-entities-at-the-heart-of-censorship-and-surveillance/>

Richards, Neil. “PRIVACY AND TECHNOLOGY: THE DANGERS OF SURVEILLANCE, p. 1934.” Washington University School of Law, Harvard Law Review. 20 May. 2013. Web. 11 September. 2014.<http://harvardlawreview.org/2013/05/the-dangers-of-surveillance/>

Sasso, Brandon. “The NSA Isn’t Just Spying on Us, It’s Also Undermining Internet Security.” National Journal. 29 April. 2014. Web. 19 October. 2014.<http://tinyurl.com/sasso2014>

Schneier, Bruce. “Open Letter From Top Technology Security Experts Slams NSA Spying as Destroying Security.” WashingtonsBlog. 25 Jan 2014. Web. 11 Jan 2015.

Shiffman, John. “Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans.” Reuters. 05 August. 2014. Web. 02 October. 2014 <http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805>

Starr, Barbara. “Terrorists try changes after Snowden leaks, official says.” CNN. 25 June. 2013. Web. 10 October. 2014.<http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/25/terrorists-try-changes-
after-snowden-leaks-official-says/>

Stecklow, Steve. “Foreign tech companies pitched real-time surveillance gear to Iran”. Reuters.05 December. 2012. Web. 21 October. 2014.<http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/05/15701843-foreign-tech-companies-pitched-real-time-surveillance-gear-to-iran>

Stray, Jonathan. “FAQ: What you need to know about the NSA’s surveillance programs.”

ProPublica News: Journalism in the Public Interest. 5 Aug 2014. Web. Accessed 16 Oct <http://www.propublica.org/article/nsa-data-collection-faq>

Tolstedt, Betsy E.; Joseph P. Stokes. “Self-disclosure, Intimacy, and the Depenetration Process.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 46 (1): 84–90. Sep 1984. Accessed Oct 17 2014. http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/46/1/84/

Thomas, John. “The Government’s Under-the-Radar Mass Surveillance Program.” Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. 14 Aug 2014. Web. Accessed 17 Oct 2014.<http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/the-governments.html>

Taylor, Stuart. “The Big Snoop: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Terrorists.” Brookings Institution. April 29, 2014. Web. Accessed 16 Oct 2014.<http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2014/big-snoop>

Thiessen, Marc. “The danger of what Edward Snowden has not revealed.” Washington Post. 01 July. 2013. Web. 08 October. 2014. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-the-danger-of-what-edward-snowden-has-not-revealed/2013/07/01/67f95a18-e251-11e2-aef3-339619eab080_story.html>

U.S. Legal. “Definition of Mass Surveillance.” U.S. Legal. 10 October. 2014. Web. 20 October. <http://definitions.uslegal.com/m/mass-surveillance/>

“International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights”. UN. 16 December. 1966. Web. 20 October. 2014.<http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx>

“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. UN. 10 December. 1948. Web. 20 October. <http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/>

Von Drehle, David. “The Surveillance Society.” Time International (South Pacific Edition). 8 Dec 2013. Web. Accessed 16 Oct 2014.<http://nation.time.com/2013/08/01/the-surveillance-society/>

Vlahos, James. “Surveillance Society: New High-Tech Cameras Are Watching You.” Popular Mechanics. 1 Mar 2014. Web. Accessed 17 Oct 2014.

Winslow, Robert. “Crime and Society: A Comparative Criminology of the World Asia- North Korea”. Web. 15 October. 2014. <http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/rwinslow/index.html>

Yost, Pete. “Lawmakers: Terrorists change tactics after leaks.” ABC News. 14 Jun 2014. Web. 11 Jan 2015. <http://www.wggb.com/2013/06/13/lawmakers-terrorists-change-tactics-after-leaks/>