The fear of Big Brother is justified as long as political power sits on top of us and has the means to lock us into a subordinate relationship of control. In the 1920s and 30s we saw how dictatorial regimes came into power in democracies through elections, so the sole fact that a political system is democratic is not sufficient to guarantee that civil liberties will be protected. In theory the Netherlands or any other democratic country could become a dictatorship after the next elections (and step out of the European Union and other binding international agreements if necessary).
For the sake of the efficiency of its rule (which is purportedly in the public interest) the State requires access to the private domain to understand its citizens and eventually guide them to make the right decisions. For example research into our patterns of movement to improve public transport and encourage us to make more use of it, is in the collective interest. Adaptation of higher education to put it in line with both collective requirements and individual interests is also in the public interest. The same can be said about providing safety in public space by monitoring the movements of individual citizens.

This leads to several dilemmas that have to do with our freedom. One is the centralization of digital information. It would be so easy and convenient to have a single digital pass that contains all our information on it: a combination of passport, licenses, credit card, travel card and whatever other function might seem useful. It could greatly simplify the administration of our daily lives. However we must refuse this convenience because of the fear that all our personal information, thus centralized, might fall into the wrong hands. And we’re not thinking of internet piracy (which is probably easier in the scattered model of digital identity we use now) but of the control of our private thoughts and political aspirations by Western secret services, commercial interests or other ‘Big Brother’ figures. This is an instance of how the political system we live in forces us to make counter-intuitive and inefficient choices.

Another dilemma, closely related to the first, has to do with collective security and crime. We are repeatedly faced with efforts by authorities to invade our private lives in the name of collective security and the fight against organized crime. As soon as we protest against such measures, the vast majority of citizens, who quiescently accepts these measures curtailing our privacy, can easily be led to suspect our motives: are we ourselves engaging in violent or otherwise illegal activities? If not, why refuse broader government access to our private lives? The appeal to principle, as the ACLU makes, is valiant and right but somehow seems to be less and less accepted in society. I think it is because the principle is not properly understood and our societies are more and more skeptical of any idea that has no immediate practical value. It is easy to foresee a society, in the near future, where protest against invasion of our privacy by the State will be deemed tantamount to an admission of guilt.
Such a society that, in order to guarantee the security of its citizens and the abidance of the Law, will not tolerate any ‘hiding behind the smokescreen of privacy’ will surely want to introduce the ‘personal administration card’ mentioned above for the benefit of its citizens; and then the ‘idealists’ will oppose it, not because it is a bad idea but because the State imposing it on us is not worth our trust. That argument however is unacceptable to the vast majority which does trust this ‘democratic State’; it will make the ‘idealists’ even more suspicious or marginal.

This development has been foreseen several times already in political fiction. Orwell’s 1984 is a good example. Our Western societies are becoming more like that described in ‘1984’. Where that is most clear is in the domain of ‘the war on terror’. Although there is no evidence of any meaningful terrorist threat to our Western societies we are led to believe that this threat is substantial and continuously increasing, and that the surrender not only of our privacy but more and more of our civil, economic and political rights is an urgent and adequate measure to fight terrorism.

Now if we imagine the political system that would be the result of the inversion of the pyramid – i.e. the political system as infrastructure, whereby the individual citizen is always on top – reasons to fear Big Brother evaporate. One could still imagine a ‘coup’ by the lowest layers of the pyramid to thwart our freedom and subvert the system, but that could only be done when the pyramid is inverted again. In other words, the task would become to avoid a possible ‘inversion’ of the pyramid, rather than ‘big brother’ control per se. I believe that if the vast majority of the world’s population is against the control from the top again, it will be impossible for any such ‘coup’ to succeed. History teaches us that when the political top operates without approval by the majority (i.e. legitimacy) it becomes structurally weak. Rule by fear alone does not last. This is the experience of occupations by enemy armies too.