This weekend, I was hanging around the house trying to beat
this nasty rhinovirus—a convenient excuse for laziness, I know. I
happened to be listening to MPR, and felt lucky to have the house and
the radio to myself for “This American Life,” one of life’s
serendipitious little pleasures. (I wouldn’t want to arrange my life
around a radio show, even if its host and I have a mutual appreciation society [that’s The Rake in his in-box there, thanks IG!].)
Anyway, the show was about amateur spying, which is a great subject.
The prelude was about a friend of Ira Glass’s who was a newspaper
reporter in the 1980s. He happened to be working late one night,
screwing around the way everyone does in an idle moment. When he
rebooted his computer, he used his boss’s username and made up a likely
password—and it worked! (I could go on at length about how depressing
this is that our lives are this predictable. For God’s sake, do NOT use
your spouse’s name, your child’s name, or your pet’s name as a
password.) Without even wanting to, he succumbed to what you could call
the hacker’s rush—the pure joy of trespassing with no other purpose in
mind than being where you aren’t supposed to be.
Well, the
reporter inevitably found the spreadsheets that listed the entire
company’s payroll. He was shocked to learn that he was the lowest paid
reporter on the paper, even though he had considerable seniority. This
forbidden knowledge poisoned the workplace for him; it even poisoned
his own self-image. Now you could argue that the truth, no matter how
painful, is better than functional delusion, and you’d have a point.
On
the other hand, I think it is possible to get too much information, and
to thus convert self-love into other-hatred. There are simply some
things you would rather not know about yourself, particularly what
others might think of you in the privacy of their own minds and emails.
You forget that others lack perspective on your life. You have to trust
that if they felt you really needed to know you’d screwed up, or that a
character flaw of yours was so distracting that it was ruining their
life, they’d be a man about it and tell you out loud.
When I was
a boy, I used to fantasize about reading other people’s thoughts. The
fantasy had obvious origins in being frustrated with understanding
where other people were coming from, and how they saw me—I didn’t even
know how to see myself, and it might have been useful to get access to
what others thought. But with adolescence, I realized just what a
terrible thing that particular super-power would be. You realize how
much of your interior life would be an embarassment if it screened in
public—most of it.
In this month’s cover story
about Eric Utne, we revisited an old newspaper article in which
employees of the Utne Reader confessed that they had made fun of their
boss. This phenomenon is universal, of course, but usually no one
intends for it to go public, because it can be so hurtful and prone to
exaggeration. When the private becomes public, the ugliness of the
human condition reveals itself—and only a true mensch like Utne can, as
he did, turn it into an opportunity to reflect and evolve.
Me? I would have fired the little shits.—The Editor in Sneeze