You are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

0
0

[–] DeliciousOnions ago 

The more private someone is, the less they engage in society - a totally private person is basically a mountain man surviving alone.

To put it the other way, privacy is the ability to disconnect from society in all its varying degrees.

A society which does not allow its people to disconnect from it is not based in consent any more - and that's the cornerstone of Western thought on authority structures so far. They must all be created out of the consent of the governed and not their own authority.

This breaks down in certain situations. A boat, for example, forces all the people on it to coexist in one way or another. You can't just get off - and so there are some forms of privacy that simply cannot be had. The way naval authority structures are built reflects this. A captain has more complete control over his boat and the people on it than an equivalent village of people on land.