One interview anecdote almost made it into my book, but the chapter was already too long, so I cut it. It was the agonizing story of a Connecticut woman who lived with a verbally and physically abusive husband for fifteen years until the mid-2000s. She had dinner plates thrown at her and every foul possible insult as well. The hell did not end until her own son physically assaulted his own father, restrained him, and then called the cops.
Joanne’s husband was a well-respected police officer in the local community. At home, he was a tempestuous monster. A medieval, manboy tyrant.
When I asked Joanne why she never once confided in her best friend or mother, her response crushed me: “I was just ashamed.” Fifteen years of quiet shame—a very American shame induced by the sacredness we attribute to our interrelated beliefs in privacy and personal responsibility.
In American life, we incur maximal personal responsibility for our social circumstances in return for the ‘power’ to wear a thick veil of privacy. The veil is woven with a very American pride in individual self-reliance. It signals that ‘all is well,’ regardless of what is happening.
To adults from most other human cultures I’ve studied and one I lived in for years (south India), the common American obsession with personal privacy is bizarre and offputting.
The Millennial movement toward greater public ‘vulnerability’ is perhaps a beginning to ending this broken belief system and the harms it enables.
Here is an excerpt from Part One of my forthcoming book on these themes. Unpacking them is critical to understanding how individualism works as an unconscious cultural belief system.
Chapter Three
MAKE PRIVACY SACRED
On my second day in Tamil-speaking South India in 1995, I ventured into the old city of Madurai. I wanted to visit the massive Saivite temple in the center, with its stunning two-hundred-foot towers covered in painted statuary. After I took off my sandals and stored them, I went through the south gate and hired a temple guide to take me around and explain things in English.
After the “tour,” my guide, who spoke in broken English, asked if I was hungry. I nodded, and he offered to take me to a nearby restaurant just around the corner. I didn’t know where the hell I was, so why not? Now playing cultural guide at the restaurant, the man noted that there was always a traditional fixed lunch in Tamil Nadu (i.e., you don’t order off a lunch menu). In seconds, I had a fresh banana leaf rolled out before me, sprinkled with water by a different person and topped with a pile of steaming rice from a bucket from another. Seconds later, another kid plopped three side dishes on the far side of the rice pile. Finally, another kid ladled thick yellow dal stew and poured it on my rice. It took five people to get me served!
I was so busy trying to figure out how to eat the food with my right hand, I didn’t notice that my companion hadn’t ordered his own lunch. About ten minutes in, I began to fall asleep from some medication. It was a sudden, unnatural sleepiness. I had been drugged with something akin to quaaludes. I assume it was via the water they gave me. As I turned into a pliant zombie, my “friend” escorted me outside to an autorickshaw. I still have no recollection of who paid for lunch, if anyone.
My captor asked me to tell him where my apartment was, info which I have no recollection of giving to him or the driver. I do remember trying to push him out of the rickshaw and get home on my own, but my muscles wouldn’t comply. The scene had turned into “get the sick white man home.” The temple guide was now playing the part of my “rescuer” to everyone we encountered. No one else around seemed to suspect anything.
I remember unlocking my apartment gate and being “helped” up the stairs behind it. When we both entered my apartment, I passed out on my mattress, with him sitting behind me in my living room.
When I woke up hours later, he was long gone. It was now early evening, and the gate to my apartment was swinging open at the bottom of the stairs. I first checked that I hadn’t been attacked, sexually or otherwise, then searched the apartment for missing items. My traveler’s checks, all $2,000 worth, were gone. But I still had my passport in my neck pouch. The checks were worthless in the legal banking market without that ID. A silver lining?
I was sitting there in my apartment with about 500 rupees in cash. I had to solve my money problem because I had two more months in India. I desperately wanted to call my parents due to the shock of everything. But I couldn’t bear the humiliation. Plus, there wasn’t anything they knew that I didn’t know about how to solve this problem. I just had to get to the nearest Amex office, which could reissue the checks, which, when I called around that night, was a five-hour bus ride away. And they wanted a copy of a local police report to prove I’d made some feeble attempt to recover the money.
When I recounted this tale years later to my Tamil friends where I was doing fieldwork, one of the otherwise mild-mannered guys blurted out, “Where is this idiot? We’ll go beat him up!” These were church choir boys, just to be clear, so I was shocked to hear their suggestion of violent retribution. And they weren’t exaggerating for effect. Trust me.
The Tamil response to my drugging, abduction, and robbery highlights, by magical inversion, the power of American middle-class culture to make everyone feel solely responsible for their own problems. Instead of pointing out what I did wrong to get myself in trouble (the American response), they just wanted to defend their friend and protect the group against a threat. Clearly, to my friends, I was taken advantage of and bore no responsibility for simple naivete. Not once did any of them suggest I was an idiot for letting it happen. And Tamil culture is not shy about interpersonal confrontation about anything.
I didn’t call my parents that day because I didn’t want to hear them lecture me about being more careful. They may not have done this, but I was culturally primed to think they would. Like most survivors of trauma, the last thing you need to hear is, “You got yourself into this mess.” Yet that is precisely how we are all taught to think when this kind of thing happens. A proud, urban culture of self-help (and self-help books) almost requires that we solve our problems alone. Eventually, you come to believe that you caused most of the problems in your life, which, as with your successes in life, is an absurd illusion I hope to burst open in this book.
Learn to Conceal Your Interpersonal Trauma
By defining interpersonal failures, traumas, and tragedy (whether failed relationships, getting conned abroad, or old-fashioned physical abuse) as personal outcomes, American cultural ideology convinces us that we are individually responsible for what happened. The social context that created the perfect conditions of possibility for a bad social outcome fades into the margins of our moral memory. We didn’t speak up early enough. We didn’t prepare. We asked for it.
In the 1990s, the modern rape survivor expression, “You did nothing wrong,” did not exist. I would wager most older Americans still believe that the individual is primarily responsible for entering a dangerous social context and then suffering trauma there. “You had to know it was dangerous. You didn’t do your homework.” This thinking is still everywhere, even as younger folks challenge it.
The key word here is “know.” Is it reasonable to expect that everyone understands what could go wrong in any given social context they are freely allowed to enter with zero preparation? Freedom of mobility would then imply a hell of a lot of foreknowledge (via Neuralink?).
Yet, who holds that knowledge before entering new relationships or social spaces? And how would this critical knowledge get to the naive effectively anyway? And why, oh why, do we always rely on prophylactic education to prevent individual missteps?
“You should have done your homework” strikes me as an impossible standard in more than a few situations encountered in modern urban life. This is especially true in a rapidly changing society when individuals are straying far beyond their family’s knowledge base. “Do your homework” is an introverted librarian’s approach to social policy and the social protection of individuals.
Only in the extremes of natural disasters and mass shootings do we seem to look first to context and not blame the victims.
The result of America’s culture of hyper-individualistic moral reasoning is that trauma survivors learn to hide behind a self-imposed veil of privacy. Too many bury the trauma for years or even forever. And the more privileged the individual, the more that shame hardens that veil of privacy and the threat of embarrassment.
One question still haunts me about that blistering hot day in June 1995: Why was I, a naive graduate student from abroad, allowed to wander into central Madurai alone? After all, the local college year-abroad program run by the university I was affiliated with gave their students thorough introductions to local risks. The university knew I was going there. But their obligation ended with getting their local contact to set up an apartment for me and send me an address. That was it. I was otherwise on my own. Why? I still have no good answer decades later.
Being alone with the temple guide opened up the opportunity for a con game. Nothing would have happened had just one additional person been with me. This is why Tamils always go to new places with companions, preferably a posse. It’s tough to con an entire group unless you are the CEO.
I later learned that the Meenakshi temple was known for doing nothing to prevent unauthorized guides from operating on the premises. Would have been nice to know.
Making Privacy Sacred Leaves Us Very Alone
We are encouraged to say, Leave me alone in defiance to anyone who objects to our individual quests in work, romance, or leisure. In return, we do not ask society to accept responsibility for bad interpersonal outcomes. We asked for freedom, so society essentially checks out and hopes for the best (or remains indifferent). We only invite society back in to help us pick up the pieces. Perhaps. And this is more likely if we are female or grew up with strong family values.
The sacredness of privacy in American culture requires us to bury our personal traumas and failures, to confess them to no one (or much later when something in our lives blows up). Suck it up, kid, and move on.
If we don’t want people all up in our personal business all the time, we kind of have to keep our problems to ourselves. We must keep everyone out, letting them receive only a filtered version of our life. This is what I might call the LinkedIn performance of recent professional achievement. If you choose to reveal your trauma, it’s your choice. But society has no right to access this personal knowledge, despite how useful it would be for your boss, spouse, parents, etc., to know it.
The sacredness of privacy makes it impossible for society to prevent needless trauma at the individual level. Most of us don’t grant society the authority to edit our personal wanderings in advance, which is when guidance is most beneficial. Society intervenes mainly in reaction to individual moves.
In modern America, we have all manner of privacy protection tools to protect a thin layer of foundational ID data about ourselves, data that can be used to “steal our identity” in legal and financial terms: datawiping software, search history deletions, credit freezes, personal data deletion on Google, cache wiping, and incognito browser tabs. We live in a world where we interact ever more with impersonal systems and bureaucracies run by people we will never know. And as a result, our foundational ID paranoia has never been higher as a society. And honestly, the financial risks of identity theft are measurable and growing.1
Yet, media coverage of database breaches has only ratcheted up the privacy mania in our country, making it harder for any of us to question the deal we have made with the devil of alienation.
What am I talking about?
By making privacy sacred, we hide our biggest problems from all but one or two people (or everyone if it is very humiliating). The result is that fewer people than ever actually know us deeply. How can we claim to know someone well without knowing their failures, most profound flaws, and deepest low points? Premodern village communities, where everyone is all up in every family member’s business, share this interpersonal knowledge. We seem to have conveniently forgotten that this means that these quaint villagers are fully known by a lot more people than we ever will be.
Most Americans have decided it’s better for our boss, colleagues, industry peers, and weak ties to know just a thin layer about us, the “happy face.” Given how often you work with your core colleagues, this seems very odd. On the nineteenth-century family farm, the family knew everyone’s sh*t and worked together all day. When the eldest son had a tantrum on the tractor, everyone knew it was just a bad temper (or something else). Family members did not freak out and see the signs of a man about to grab a gun and shoot people. They understood the individual family member’s behavior patterns well. They had loads of context. There is no substitute for knowing people well.
Changes in social structure and local residency tenure in modern America mean we have a smaller circle of close people who have deep knowledge of us than ever before. The related epidemic of self-reported loneliness many feel in modern America results from curating a problem free self to 99 percent of our social network, including those we spend hours with daily. At the same time, only a tiny few get to know what is really going on.
The disconnect between these two selves is the tragic source of our loneliness. And if we lie to our spouse or partner, the loneliness could be maddening.
Here’s the apparent truth many modern Americans have forgotten. Humans don’t trust those who we don’t fully understand as individuals. That’s what Edward Snowden reacted to in his whistleblower rage back in 2013. What if an NSA analyst drank too much cold brew and misinterpreted what someone said about Iran on the phone last Sunday, and that someone’s name is Muhammed?
Our fear of privacy invasion rests on the fear of someone passing judgment on a scrap of our behavior with no real context. And because we insist culturally on keeping people out, we actively willed the possibility of this fear into being. We authored it. We invited it into our lives. We love it. Most of us do, at least.
We would have to become massively confessional to a much larger audience to pull the privacy curtain aside and not be afraid. Then, we would have to hope this broader audience would not use that information against us (which some obviously would).
In a weak tie, consumer society like ours, the last hope is a pipe dream.
Stigmatize the Busybodies
At the neighborhood level, we can see how extreme privacy beliefs cripple our communities and, in turn, individuals in trouble. Sometimes, it takes an extreme example to make out the dynamics. I want to share a story of how racism and privacy beliefs combined to hide a monster living nearby.
It was the early 1990s in a predominantly black neighborhood in West Milwaukee. A thirty-six-year-old black mother named Glenda Cleveland saw suspicious behavior multiple times across the street at the Oxford Apartments. She called the police to intervene directly when the weird white guy seemed to be dragging a very young, visibly uncooperative, and drunk Asian boy toward the entrance of the building. The police proceeded to believe a young white man over a middle-aged, middle-class black woman and let the man, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, take his drunk victim home. Dahmer knew what to do. He wore the mask of the kindhearted friend caring for a drunk buddy. Why question this performance in a free society, where getting drunk isn’t suspicious? In which we protect the white stranger’s privacy above all others?
Glenda was a concerned neighbor who wanted her street to be safe. She was engaged in organic surveillance of her surroundings, common in neighborhoods where objective crime rates are high enough to warrant more heightened vigilance. She was aggressive and angry because you would be too if you wanted a neighborhood like this not to decay further.
In her astute mind, white men don’t tend to bring Asian boys home in her neighborhood. It was understandably odd. And Dahmer’s child victim didn’t look able to consent to anything.
The Milwaukee police had ignored Glenda repeatedly in the past. She was branded a busybody who often called them with “overblown” concerns. She was also an “angry black woman,” one of the most marginalized identity positions you can have in urban America.
Had Glenda been an angry white woman, I think the police would have responded differently, but only to a point. There is no precedent for police to “investigate” anyone’s residence without probable cause or a warrant . . . or . . . with resident permission. That’s convenient for violent sociopaths or even generic abusers. Just talk your way out of it and close the door on the police. Tell a story to maintain your privacy. Ask for a warrant.
There is no database of “nosy neighbor incidents,” let alone one broken down by type (e.g., nighttime noise, excessive barking, human screams, gunshots, etc.). We don’t know how many false alarms get generated in America by the well-intentioned Glenda Clevelands of this world. We don’t know how common “busybody behavior” is or how often it gets ignored by authorities.
A few years back, though, I researched an analogous behavior which explains in part why so many of us distrust the Glenda Clevelands of the world—reporting child abuse. My trigger was learning that a neighbor had their kids taken away for a mandatory forty-eight-hour investigation period based on an ER nurse’s “concern.” When I dug into the Washington State data, I found that, in 2022, roughly 82 percent of child abuse complaints didn’t pan out as valid (i.e., it didn’t lead to validation of the initial claim and intervention).2 Most of these abuse referrals came from third-party professionals without real context on the parents involved.
That’s a frightening degree of inaccuracy, almost as bad as the record of indicting witches in seventeenth-century Salem, MA.3
Yet, as a society that believes in the sacredness of privacy, we continue to favor and believe in the judgment of state-appointed surveillance agents to solve hidden, domestic problems.4 Glenda Cleveland called these agents of the state because she couldn’t rally a Hatfield versus McCoy posse to confront Dahmer. And then the state authorities ignore the Glenda Clevelands of the world, the neighbor, but not the ER nurse? We must really want our neighbors to stay out of our lives if this is the bargain we’ve struck.
Perhaps we want the neighbors out of these interventions because they have the most opportunities to misinterpret a random comment (i.e., from across the fence line). They are closest to the source data for a complaint and yet don’t know us any better than our boss, actually probably much less.
Americans hate neighborly busybodies because they avoid direct confrontation by tattling on us. Yet our radical approach to privacy and declining community ethos in local neighborhoods only encourages us all to tattle to the police as we are not really comfortable confronting people we barely know. So, we tattle on the people with absolutely zero context. It doesn’t take long to imagine why black folks are the least likely to file a noise complaint and why so many black people have been killed or jailed due to irrational complaints given to police with no real context.5
What does all this privacy yield? A lot less interpersonal verbal confrontation in our everyday lives. Instead, we outsource this confrontation to the bureaucratic state.
What else do we get? A lot of hidden domestic violence. Around 4 percent of the US adult population experiences violent domestic assault yearly.6 This highly conservative estimate is twelve times higher than the rate of identity theft we worry so much about. Yet, we barely talk about domestic assault. It’s carefully hidden from standoffish neighbors. And the more income and wealth, the more separated you are from your neighbors physically, making the concealment of abuse even easier.
Our Grand Bargain with Law Enforcement
We live in a society that has made a grand bargain with most of its citizenry to maintain their domestic privacy, especially, and most ironically, privacy from our neighbors.7
We let law enforcement handle antisocial behavior and don’t deal with it ourselves. This is even more true across lines of class and race. This outsourcing of local dispute management includes domestic abuse right next door to us, which needs detection and intervention in minutes to prevent injury or death. The latter would truly be a headscratcher for the Yanomami of Venezuela and most tribal communities I have researched in my career.
The Yanomami, for example, still live in circular ring shelters with their extended family (dozens and dozens of people), all present and visible to each other more or less. Privacy occurs in the jungle, if anywhere. Since the jungle is not a safe place for a lone person, privacy is not a priority.
This grand bargain absolves us, as modern individuals, of the responsibility to intervene with our family members in return for gaining privacy from these very friends and family.
We “don’t butt in” on family members’ problems.
We “let them solve their own problems” and “stay out of it.”
We “mind our business” even with the folks closest to us.
And, let’s face it, we relish this fundamental irresponsibility to them. It not only saves us lots of time intervening in high-conflict situations. It saves our emotional energy for other leisure pursuits. In the history of humanity, deliberate social irresponsibility in the service of individual privacy is bizarre at best and pathologically self-absorbed at worst.
If the bad actor doesn’t live with us, we presume not to know what is happening nearby. We don’t want to know in many cases.
Sadly, in the case of domestic abuse, our grand bargain places an enormous burden on a victim’s nonresident family and friends. The victim often lives in fear of reporting their partner. So, the family/friends of the victim have to pierce the sacred veil of privacy and report abusive individuals to the police. Reporting is not likely to happen if the victim actively hides the abuse (sadly common). You can now see the Achilles’ heel of our privacy beliefs. It makes no sense. And, when an individual has threatened to harm a victim if they break the grand bargain, these situations can fester for years and years. And they do.
Social science has an old concept called “the conditions of possibility.” The conditions of possibility for a behavior or an event are the social variables that permit it to be more likely than not.
The conditions of possibility for rampant domestic abuse include our small household structure, soundproofed dwellings, and, most critically, our belief in the sacredness of individual privacy.
Due to highly private residential settlement patterns, older Americans have gained a fair amount of wisdom about the ripple effects of abuse in families and communities. They understand that individuals who are abusers rarely get caught, reported, or dealt with swiftly by the local law enforcement we claim to trust so much. Even prosecuting these cases is notoriously tricky, given the lack of witnesses in our privacy-obsessed society.
I understand why many older Americans I surveyed recently are tired and fed up with violent men and domestic abusers getting away with their behavior despite multiple calls to the police (who rarely do much initially).8
Here’s what I found in my recent survey:
Sixty-one percent of older Americans (those most likely to have already experienced abuse in their lives) believe that convicted domestic abusers should be monitored by local law enforcement.
Fifty-one percent of the same folks want local law enforcement to monitor those who merely threaten others with violence.9
These older Americans think local law enforcement should be the primary monitoring force even though neighbors live nearby. Do you agree?
If you do, note that this is not what our legal system is set up to handle. And the second item above would violate our constitutional enshrinement of domestic privacy. It wouldn’t even be legal.
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Identity theft with financial consequences is occurring at around 1.4 million incidents per year, affecting one-third of one percent of the US population. It’s fairly common, but it probably won’t happen more than once or twice in your lifetime at current rates. Source: Jim Akin, “Identity Theft Is on the Rise, Both in Incidents and Losses,” Experian.com, October 11, 2022, accessed July 23, 2023, https://www.experian.com /blogs /ask-experian/identity-theft-statistics/.
Washington State Department of Children, Youth, and Families, “Child Welfare Overview CY 2022,” published August 2023, accessed January 2, 2024, https://www.dcyf.wa.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/OIAA-ChildWelfareOverviewCY2022.pdf.
The lower courts initially indicted many suspects based on spectral attack performed during the depositions themselves. Of the initial fifty-six defendants, only three were condemned because a higher court disallowed spectral evidence that most later acknowledged was likely fabricated due to interpersonal grievances. Jess Blumberg, “A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials,” Smithsonian Magazine, online edition, October 23, 2007, accessed July 24, 2023, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-salem-witch-trials-175162489/#:~:text=The%20Salem%20witch%20trials%20occurred,magic%E2%80%94and%2020%0were%20executed.
America’s greatest disrespect of privacy continues to be shown toward African Americans and Native Americans, who remain the most unintegrated and subordinated social groups in modern America.
Katrina Feldkamp and S. Rebecca Neusteter, “The Little Known, Racist History of the 911 Emergency Call System,” In These Times, January 26, 2021, accessed July 25, 2023, https://inthesetimes.com /article/911-emergency-service-racist-history-civil-rights.
Fifty percent of domestic abuse victims never report these crimes for obvious reasons, so I suspect the 4 percent number is a vast undercount. Furthermore, 25 percent of women in the United States will experience domestic violence during their lifetime, suggesting the broad reach of this trauma in American society. A. E. Bonomi, B. Trabert, M. L. Anderson, M. A. Kernic, V. L. Holt, “Intimate Partner Violence and Neighborhood Income: A Longitudinal Analysis,” Violence Against Women 20, no. 1(2014): 42–58, doi: 10.1177/1077801213520580, accessed July 25, 2023, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5486977/.
There are clear origins here in the cultural traditions of Anglo-Saxon/Nordic groups who colonized the United States from the seventeenth century onward. However, the ideology here has become the dominant middle-class ethos, observable by me and others even among middle-class blacks, latinos, and asians. Our very residential setup as middle-class Americans encourages the adoption of this ethos of extreme privacy.
A 2015 research study on how domestic violence victims approach the use of local law enforcement indicates how a lack of trust on both sides has made police involvement a very weak solution. Source: T. K. Logan, PhD, and Rob Valente, “Who Will Help Me? Domestic Violence Survivors Speak Out About Law Enforcement Responses,” 2015, National Domestic Violence Hotline, accessed July 25, 2023, https://www.thehotline.org /wp -content/uploads/sites/3/2015/09/NDVH-2015-Law-Enforcement -Survey-Report.pdf.
National Survey on Older Americans by the Social Awareness Institute, summer 2022. The study looked at attitudes and behaviors among 2,983 adults aged forty-five to seventy-four with at least a high school degree. Referred to hereafter as SAI National Survey on Older Americans, 2022.
Beyond excited for your book! Thank you for writing it 😊
I wonder if this pattern is equally true for American women. As a single dad, I'm often the only man at playgrounds or other kid zones, and I've listened in on many conversations between women. There doesn't seem to be much filter there, at least in complaining about their husbands. Similarly, I know that transparency about income and other equity issues is a staple of feminism. My female colleagues were always much more open and vocal about workplace concerns than my male colleagues. Similarly, my male friends typically don't talk about any concerns they might have about their home lives, perhaps because they feel that it makes them look whiny or weak.
So I wonder if this is a general American problem, or if it might be more of a gendered one.