Our changing personal habits accelerate the peril. 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.
In Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, photographer Timo Križka and his wife, Petra, are members of their country’s first postcommunist generation. They were born around the time of the Velvet Revolution that overthrew the communist regime and the Velvet Divorce that peacefully separated the Czech Republic from Slovakia. Neither carries personal memories of communism, of course, but they did grow up in its immediate aftermath—and with parents and other adults who still had the habits developed under totalitarianism.
Petra took some of them with her to the United States when she went as an exchange student in 2005. This was not long after the 9/11 terrorist attack, when a heightened sense of security pervaded the country.
“I saw that people were willing to sacrifice a lot of their personal freedoms for the sake of national security,” says Petra. “There was a lot of talk along the lines of, ‘I don’t care if they listen to my phone calls or read my emails or text messages, because I don’t have anything bad to say.’ So that was really strange for me, because I thought, this is something really personal. And it doesn’t really matter if you do or don’t have something bad to say. It’s just my personal space.”
How strange it was for a teenager to come from a culture just emerging from the reality of one careless word or indiscreet meeting having the potential to destroy a person’s life, only to find herself living temporarily in one where everyone said whatever they wanted to, without a care in the world.
Should it not have felt liberating? Not to Petra, with her background in a society where privacy was precious. Her conflicting feelings highlight a philosophical and psychological dimension to the public-private divide over the meaning of living in truth. In his best-known novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the Czech writer Milan Kundera contrasts the attitudes of two characters—Sabina, a Czech woman, and her Swiss lover, Franz—on the importance of personal privacy to authenticity.
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,” Kundera writes, speaking for Sabina. “Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.”17
Kundera’s observations, emerging from his own experience of communism, are as relevant as ever. 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.”18
Their deep unhappiness comes from the isolation they feel, despite being connected, thanks to smartphone-enabled social networking, to more people than any generation ever has. 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.
Of course most of their peers aren’t having more vivid and intense lives; they are just better at curating their images online. Young people today are living in illusions, perhaps none greater than that they are part of a real social network. In fact, this technology and the culture that has emerged from it is reproducing the atomization and radical loneliness that totalitarian communist governments used to impose on their captive peoples to make them easier to control.
And having become habituated to sharing reams of personal data with marketers simply by moving through their daily lives online, these young people are making themselves highly vulnerable to manipulation by corporations and outside entities. To put it bluntly, we are being conditioned to accept a Westernized version of China’s social credit system, which will enforce the tenets of the political cult of social justice. If this ever takes root here, there will be no place to hide. Christians and others who refuse to conform will be forced to pioneer a way to live in truth, despite it all.
This is why the testimonies of those who lived in truth under hard totalitarianism are so urgently needed.
Shelter from the Gathering Storm
In the West today, we are living under decadent, pre-totalitarian conditions. Social atomization, widespread loneliness, the rise of ideology, widespread loss of faith in institutions, and other factors leave society vulnerable to the totalitarian temptation to which both Russia and Germany succumbed in the previous century.
Furthermore, intellectual,
