Private Concerns

"...it may be confidently asserted--the distrust of all government, the insight into the useless and harassing nature of these short-winded struggles, must drive men to an entirely new resolution...to the neglect of the conception the state and the abolition of the contrast of "private and public." Private concerns gradually absorb the business of the state; even the toughest residue which is left over from the old work of governing (the business, for instance, which is meant to protect private person from private persons) will at last someday be managed by private enterprise. The neglect, decline, and death of the sate, the liberation of the private person (I am careful not to say the individual), are the consequences of the democratic conception of the state; that is its mission..." Nietzsche, "A Glance at the State" Human, all too Human

Christianity has interfered by urging the suppression of the individual and the encouragement of a private sentiment. Privacy is no way to understand ourselves. With privacy, the only venue for communication is trade or possibly the authoritative inner monologue. We occupy our bodies and leave others to their bodies. Treating ours as temples, and others' as vessels, our bodies become fortresses, storefronts, or bathhouses, adapting to the enterprises around us. A way to overcome privacy is to remain the same structure all of the time, built with design and meditation for practicality and plasticity to redirect entropy rather than escape from it into another building. The double edged sword is only dangerous when its surplus is too great, its gurth too heavy for us to yield, or when we have simply stopped paying attention.