I don't think I follow your point about income level. At first blush it sounds like you are suggesting the poor care more about freedom (or have more to fear from the FBI/CIA?).
I am personally not worried about my own safety at all. Or maybe it's more fair to say that I worry no more about my safety than anyone would living under the nuclear sword of Damocles (never mind an environment out of kilter) — or that I worry no more about my safety than I would about any other's safety.
If I am older I suspect it has given me the perspective to see that we live in a time when people can do horrendous things on a scale where thousands die in a single evil event and that we should not accept this as a society — we should not hold instead to some hard-line idealism of requiring everything to be free and open.
Again, I am not personally afraid of being the target of some sort of random act of terror, nor am I naive to think that a secretive government organization given a blank check could completely eliminate such a threat. But when something horrible happens again, if our leaders were asleep at the wheel and did nothing, we could be well expected to be also enraged with them, to have expected more from them.
I don't think I even agree with your continuum of "freedom <-> safety". We're never truly "safe". To allow for bad actors to do harm is more an affront to justice if you ask me.
Their point is you have a lot to lose by bucking the status quo, so consciously or not, why fight it? One could also argue that fitting in with society tends to produce better rewards than not, so those less likely to fight it do well?
Either way hard to not notice that cries to ‘f the man’ tend to die out as income and age rise.
“I don't think I follow your point about income level”
it makes sense when you consider that TLAs basic function is to preserve the status quo for wall street. we subvert democracy overseas to preserve corporate profits and have been doing so for many generations a la United Fruit Company, selling weapons to saudi arabia, etc.
I am personally not worried about my own safety at all. Or maybe it's more fair to say that I worry no more about my safety than anyone would living under the nuclear sword of Damocles (never mind an environment out of kilter) — or that I worry no more about my safety than I would about any other's safety.
If I am older I suspect it has given me the perspective to see that we live in a time when people can do horrendous things on a scale where thousands die in a single evil event and that we should not accept this as a society — we should not hold instead to some hard-line idealism of requiring everything to be free and open.
Again, I am not personally afraid of being the target of some sort of random act of terror, nor am I naive to think that a secretive government organization given a blank check could completely eliminate such a threat. But when something horrible happens again, if our leaders were asleep at the wheel and did nothing, we could be well expected to be also enraged with them, to have expected more from them.
I don't think I even agree with your continuum of "freedom <-> safety". We're never truly "safe". To allow for bad actors to do harm is more an affront to justice if you ask me.