> Fascinating, isn't it?
Yes. From a human psychology POV it's absolutely fascinating (in the
sense of being an open puzzle that compels one to ask deep questions).
It concerns much more than illegal mass surveillance. What is truly
astonishing is the distance between the stories we tell ourselves and
the reality we inhabit. It's the same denial and rationalisation that
means we can cope with climate emergency.
Our age is the spectacle of the chasm. There's an enormous gulf
between our mythology - what we tell ourselves about our rational
civilisation, our empowerment by technology, our omniscient knowledge,
our social contract, our freedom... etc - and the reality - that we
have almost no basis for reason (except within narrow confines of
science), are dominated by our technology, live in ignorance and fear,
have torn up social contracts and become slaves to 19th century
ideologies.
This is the interregnum in which you can have revelations on the scale
of Snowden exposing colossal constitutional violations, and have
people shrug.
>> to have an 'official' perspective is to be able to move on with your life
Except people don't. They pretend to. In reality they move on with a
shadow of what approximates to life under the conditions of
extraordinary dissonance. They become docile, domesticated shells of
real people for whom cultural, educational, economic and spiritual
life dimensions are crippled. The awareness of dominance doesn't
magically vanish, it is sublimated into broad cynicism, sarcasm,
duplicity and inability to trust or believe in anything.
Don't mistake tolerance for the effects being rendered harmless by
wilful ignorance.