Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

by Rod Dreher

In our time and place, the willingness of people to disclose deeply personal data about themselves—either actively, on platforms like Facebook, or passively, through online data harvesting—is creating a new kind of person: the “social me...

The American conservative tradition, unlike that of Europe, has been philosophically antagonistic to the state.

Now an elite club of global megacorporations are more powerful than many countries.

“[G]raduates of the academic victimology complex are remaking the world in their image.”

Nearly 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies have diversity offices, she reports, and the corporate mania for “equity, diversity, and inclusion” informs corporate culture at many levels, including hiring, promotion, bonuses, and governing the norms of interaction in the workplace.

The embrace of aggressive social progressivism by Big Business is one of the most underappreciated stories of the last two decades. Critics call it “woke capitalism,” a snarky theft of the left-wing slang term indicating progressive enlightenment.

Woke capitalism is now the most transformative agent within the religion of social justice, because it unites progressive ideology with the most potent force in American life: consumerism and making money.

Woke capitalist branding harnesses the unmatched propaganda resources of the advertising industry to send the message, both explicitly and implicitly: the beliefs of social conservatives and religious traditionalists are obstacles to the social good.

The politicization of life in corporations along social justice lines has occurred at the same time that Big Business has embraced amassing personal data as a key sales and marketing strategy.

In the twenty-first century, Big Brother has found a much more insidious way into our homes. In fact, he has been invited. Nearly 70 million Americans have one or more wireless “smart speakers”—usually manufactured by Amazon or Google—in their residences.4 Smart speakers are voice-recognition devices connected to the internet. They serve as digital assistants, recording vocal commands, and in response, executing actions—obtaining information, ordering retail goods, controlling lights and music, and so forth. For over 25 percent of the population, convenience has overcome privacy concerns.

Consumerism is how we are learning to love Big Brother. What’s more, Big Brother is not exactly who we expected him to be—a political dictator, though one day he may become that. At the present moment, Big Brother’s primary occupation is capitalist.

Big Brother is laying the foundation for soft totalitarianism, both in terms of creating and implementing the technology for political and social control and by grooming the population to accept it as normal. This is the world of “surveillance capitalism,”

The masters of data aren’t simply trying to figure out what you like; they are now at work making you like what they want you to like, without their manipulation being detected.

who are at present without means to escape the surveillance capitalists’ web.

You may have given up Facebook over privacy concerns, and may have vowed never to have a smart device under your roof, but unless you are a hermit living off the grid, you are still thoroughly bounded and penetrated by the surveillance capitalist system.

Your smart refrigerator is sending data about your eating habits to someone. Your smart television is doing the same thing about what you’re watching. Your smart television will soon be watching you, literally.

company called Realeyes that will use facial data recognition to make it possible for machines to analyze emotions using facial responses. When this technology becomes available, your smart TV (smartphone or laptop) will be able to monitor your involuntary response to commercials and other programming and report that information to outside sources.

Silicon Valley is well known to be far to the left on social and cultural issues, a veritable mecca of the cult of social justice.

Social justice warriors are known for the spiteful disdain they hold for classically liberal values like free speech, freedom of association, and religious liberty.

The rising generation of corporate leaders takes pride in their progressive awareness and activism.

Twenty-first-century capitalism is not only all in for surveillance, it is also very woke.

powerful corporate interests using that data to manipulate individuals into thinking a...

how will people know when they are being manipulated?

If a corporation with access to private data decides that progress requires suppressing dissenting opinions, it will be easy to identify the dissidents, even if they have said not one word publicly. In fact, they may have their public voices muted.

for the search engine preferred by 90 percent of global internet users, “progress”—as defined by left-wing Westerners living in Silicon Valley—is presented as normative.

Twitter, a San Francisco-based company with 330 million global users, especially among media and political elites, is not a publicly regulated utility; it is under no legal obligation to offer free speech to its users. But consider how it would affect everyday communications if social media and other online channels that most people have come to depend on—Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, and others—were to decide to cut off users whose religious or political views qualified them as bigots in the eyes of the digital commissars?

Both the spread of the cult of social justice and the reach of surveillance capitalism into areas that the Orwellian tyrants of the communist bloc could only have aspired to have created an environment favorable to the emergence of soft totalitarianism. Under this Pink Police State scenario, powerful corporate and state actors will control populations by massaging them with digital velvet gloves, and by convincing them to surrender political liberties for security and convenience.

We don’t have to imagine the dystopian merging of commerce and political authoritarianism in a total surveillance state. It already exists in the People’s Republic of China.

China today proves that it is possible to have a wealthy, modern society and still be totalitarian.

Beijing’s use of consumer data, biometric information, GPS tracking coordinates, facial recognition, DNA, and other forms of data harvesting has turned, and continues to turn, China into a beast never before seen worldwide, not even under Mao or Stalin.

In China, the tools of surveillance capitalism are employed by the surveillance state to administer the so-called social credit system, which determines who is allowed to buy, sell, and travel, based on their social behavior.

“The project aims to form not only a new kind of state but a new kind of human being, one who has fully internalized the demands of the state and the completeness of its surveillance and control.

police don’t have to show up at the suspect’s door to make him pay for his disobedience. China’s social credit system automatically tracks the words and actions, online and off, of every Chinese citizen, and grants rewards or demerits based on obedience.

A Chinese who does something socially positive—helping an elderly neighbor with a chore, or listening to a speech of leader Xi Jinping—receives points toward a higher social credit score. On the other hand, one who does something negative—letting his or her dog poop on the sidewalk, for example, or making a snarky comment on social media—suffers a social credit downgrade.

Because digital life, including commercial transactions, is automatically monitored, Chinese with high social credit ratings gain privileges. Those with lower scores find daily life harder. They aren’t allowed to buy high-speed train tickets or take flights. Doors close to certain restaurants. Their children may not be allowed to go to college. They may lose their job and have a difficult time finding a new one. And a social credit s...

The bottom line: a Chinese citizen cannot participate in the economy or society unless he has the mark of approval from Xi Jinping, the country’s all-powerful leader.

In a cashless society, the state has the power to bankrupt dissidents instantly by cutting off access to the internet. And in a society in which everyone is connected digitally, the state can make anyone an instant pariah when the algorithm turns them radioactive, even to their family.

The Chinese state is also utilizing totalitarian methods for ensuring the coming generations don’t have the ima...

condition of the youth in consumerist China is more Huxley than Orwell.

if some dissidents did emerge, the government’s total information system would quickly identify and “harmonize” them before they had the opportunity to act—or even before they had the conscious thought of dissenting.

Chinese officials are applying predictive software to its data culls to identify potential future leaders and possible enemies of the state before awareness of their potential rises to the individuals’ minds.

The only barriers preventing it from being imposed are political resistance by unwilling majorities and constitutional resistance by the judiciary.

activating the broad reach of technology, especially the data-gathering technology that consumers have already accepted into their daily lives, and making it work to serve social justice goals is eminently feasible.

The collapse of a commonly held belief in guarding online privacy removes the most important barrier to state control of private life. This is something that alarms those with experience under communism.

For Franz, who had always lived in the West, to live in truth meant to live transparently, without any secrets. Yet for Sabina, a lifelong citizen of communist Czechoslovakia, living in truth was possible only within a private life.

“The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful,”

“Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means...

During the past decade or so, since the invention of the smartphone and social media, and the confessional culture they have created, we have gained a great deal of knowledge about how people—teenagers and young adults, mostly—create “Instagrammable” lives for themselves. That is, they say and do things, including sharing intensely personal information, to construct an image of a life that strikes their peers—whether they know them personally or not—as appealing, as desirable. They live for the approval of others, represented by Likes on Facebook, or other tokens of affirmation.

Psychologist Jean Twenge has tracked the astonishing rise of teenage depression and suicide among the first generation to come of age with smartphones and social media. She describes them “as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades,” and says that “much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”

Smartphone culture has radically increased the social anxiety they experience, as information coming through their phones convinces sensitive teenagers—especially girls—that they are being left out of the more exciting lives others are having.