Now, our distant hunter-gatherer ancestors had to be vigilant. Their lives depended on their keen vigilance. However, to us, their keen vigilance might seem to border on paranoia. So perhaps Kirn's admitted paranoia is evoking something in his collective unconscious.
Even when our distant ancestors took up the practice of living in villages for months at a time, they needed to keep their vigilance attuned to detect possible threats.
Moreover, in their villages, everybody tended to know everybody else's business. In short, they did not have Kirn's sense of privacy.
So if we do indeed live in the age of Big Data and Big Surveillance, as Kirn suggests we do, then we should perhaps expect that further challenges to our culturally conditioned sense of privacy will emerge.
If we were to experience the feelings of powerlessness that Kirn reports feeling, then we should perhaps see ourselves as involved in an existential crisis.
But did our distant ancestors have to face existential threats in their lives that might conceivably have been as threatening to them and their lives as Kirn suggests that Big Data and Big Surveillance may be to us and our lives -- or at least to our culturally conditioned sense of privacy?
You bet, they did. In oral-traditional epics such as the ODYSSEY and BEOWULF, the characters portrayed as monsters represent monstrous existential threats to human life and culture.
Now, the French philosopher Louis Lavelle (1883-1951) has been categorized as a Christian existentialist.
In effect, Lavelle sees feelings of powerlessness as evoking the infant's abandonment feelings.
In the essay "Those Who Are Separated and United" in the book EVIL AND SUFFERING, translated by Bernard Murchland (New York, 1963; orig. French ed., 1940, pages 91-152), Lavelle makes the following statement:
"We may well think that this [metaphysical, or existential] anxiety is very primitive [i.e., from our early childhood]. If it is true that the infant's most despairing cry is not the one he utters when he feels physical pain but rather when he feels himself abandoned, when he no longer sees familiar faces around him and when all his contacts with the universe seem to him suddenly broken off. Let us not diminish the value of the distress by saying that it is purely organic; it is the very birth of self-consciousness. In the deepest moments of life it reappears. And no philosophy can attain to the heart of being without taking it as a point of departure" (page 100).
Thus Lavelle sees metaphysical anxiety, which can also be referred to as existential anxiety, as connected with the young child's wounding experience of abandonment feelings.
If and when we are able to resolve the wounding experience(s) involved in early childhood abandonment feelings, then we will emerge prepared to live our lives with optimal vitality -- despite the seemingly existential threats posed by Big Data and Big Surveillance, threats that have registered on Kirn's sensitive sensibility and his culturally conditioned sense of privacy.
In the title essay in EVIL AND SUFFERING (pages 23-90), Lavelle provides certain hints about the psychodynamic involved in healing and resolving the wounding experience(s) involved in early childhood abandonment feelings.
Lavelle sets up the contrast between the evil person and the honest person: "Suffering [including of course abandonment feelings from early childhood wounding] becomes one with the act that regenerates me; it is efficacious suffering that the evil [person] does not know and which the honest [person] nourishes rather than excuses" (page 88).
"I recognize myself in [the person] who committed the fault [from which I am suffering], but I suffer only because I refuse to remain that person [who committed the fault from which I am suffering]" (page 88).
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