Loving Big Brother

I would have thought that when Big Brother finally came it would be against our wills.

On the other hand, I do remember in third grade when Soeur St. Edouard de la Croix told us the following story about our counterparts in the Soviet Union schools.

She said the teachers there would put the little Soviet tykes through an instructional exercise. They would tell the children to pray to God for candy. Then they would have them close their eyes at their desks, as teachers quietly went around the room putting a piece of candy on each desk. Then, the teachers would exclaim, "Open your eyes! Look, God answered your prayer!"

Some clever child would inevitably say, "No, teacher. I peeked and saw you put the taffy on my desk." The teacher would close in for the kill: "That's right, little Igor Ivanovich. Now you understand that everything good that we have comes from ourselves---there is no God."

The surrendering of freedom and privacy is not that hard fought after all. Last week's Newsweek has at least two articles that demonstrate the trick. One shows how our cell phones are "snitching" on us: Federal agents are almost routinely accessing our personal data and monitoring our comings and goings via the handy gadgets we keep in our pockets. Nobody likes this, but nobody is about to give up his or her cell phone, either.

A second example of easy surrender is the Google and Facebook phenomenon. No one has to pry personal information from us. We are not only sharing it outright with strangers but prostituting it to pay for the online services we received. Googling and social networking are free---but the Faustian price is that these services read everything about you so that they can target their ads to you with laser precision. We let them do it because it makes shopping so easy. Like Esau, we sell our souls for potage.

I have always assumed that when the time came we wouldn't be able to buy or sell without the mark of the beast (Revelation 13:17-18), and it would be under duress. But maybe not. Maybe we will smile and say, "This is so convenient."

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