This is the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg.
We were not paranoid enough. I was not paranoid enough. You were not paranoid enough. Reality outstripped our imaginations. How are we going to recalibrate our expectations? What's next?
We were not paranoid enough. I was not paranoid enough. You were not paranoid enough. Reality outstripped our imaginations. How are we going to recalibrate our expectations? What's next?
...that is, assuming these aren't being done already.
What would occur is mass ostracizing and general social chaos from imploded relationships (friends, lovers, family). There would be shocking and boring skeletons, it would become a giant cultural witch hunt, pleasure would be taken in socially mocking and assaulting people with the most outrageous or abnormal skeletons. We live in a bankrupt culture that worships tabloids, gossip and low value entertainment (low value everything in fact, including food, just so long as it distracts for a moment). I see no reason to think people would suddenly change the way they go about the world: the averages for what is considered scandalous behavior would simply shift and there would be a new unlimited supply of people to be socially assaulted. Why just look at my boring skeletons compared to that guy! My scandal is nowhere near as bad as hers!
Beliefs, and the deceptions that maintain them, are more properly understood as self-fulfilling prophecies; prescriptive ideas, masquerading as descriptive ideas. I have a serious concern that if we magically evaporated every single lie, and therefore every belief, we would disintegrate back into "nature red in tooth and claw".
Our capacity for aspirational imagination and social climbing through deception is as every bit baked into the history of human evolution as our empathy for those like us, or our care for child-rearing. It is, in Stross's term, a wicked problem.
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
- Vonnegut
Unfortunately now twisted, this lesson from 9/11 stares back at us in the mirror like a nightmare. Social engineering and conditioning were manipulated by the terrorists, too. The lesson is don't be naive. People can do some ugly things. Especially when they abuse positions of trust and basic norms of civility.
We'll see after the next election. If a whole bunch of incumbent security hawks and war hawks aren't unseated by civil libertarians, then we're probably out of chances.
It would help if they aren't also crazy in their own right.
As Jimmy Carter says (as buffoonish as he might have been), we don't really have a functioning democracy any more in the US.