Privacy versus openness

I have noticed many times that when I (and, of course, others) attempt to raise an important or sensitive issue to discuss a graveyard silence starts to prevail throughout, especially when communicating with people from the West. I have not inquired deeply into this particular issue yet, but I tentatively connect it to a Western tradition of privacy, with its explicit and implicit cultural agreements. In Russia there is considerably less sense of mental boundaries and rational taboos (taboos and boundaries are multiple but more premental-rational).

By being a creature of a postcommunist country sometimes I realize that the notion of capitalist/individualist privacy seems to avoid my immediate conscious grasp. And sometimes I am just left astounded by the fact that my Western friends and partners in communication suddenly become silent or say a very superficial remark to a question that I am wondering about as of crucial and related straight to the matters of life and death, even if psychological. At times like this I am left thinking, "Oh shit, did I again address an issue too directly?" Also, I start to feel some kind of sorrow regarding the fact that this particular intersubjective space somehow self-contracted and closed from being dialogical.

And now I am perplexed in regards to one question: where does a sense of authentic privacy ends and a cunning mechanism of self-defense against the truth, the truthfulness, and the goodness starts? In therapy when a therapist addresses a sensitive trauma-related issue, the client does everything to build up resistance and avoid looking and feeling into the issue and recognizing it as one. He or she invents numerous ways of escaping the cruel reality. One of the ways to defend oneself is to simply ignore the therapist's provocations and invitations to exploration of transferential systems.

There is a striking drive in a person who was brought up in the West not to get involved and to keep distance. "This is not my business." "I have lots of, lots of things to do, no time for discussing this." In some cases it seems to result in an impulsive/compulsive reaction of building excessive boundaries and closing one's own eyes with one's own hands so as to keep ignoring a delicate but important issue; especially in the cases that require making a (even if workable) value judgment regarding, e.g., other person or community and so on.

What somehow relates to this is my increasingly growing awareness that the idea that one has first to take care of one's own backyard before doing the global work is utterly failing in the context of the global crisis. Among some of American conservatives there is an idea that USA should withdraw from any involvement with the world problems, conserve itself, solve its own problems, and only then go to take care for the world. (The same basic view, a kind of "we should take care of our asses first," is widespread around the world.) There is an important part of the whole picture in this point of view: when taking into consideration an integral picture and doing integral action one is ought to take oneself into account; if one secludes oneself from one's care, it may lead to a catastrophe or at least significantly diminish the effectiveness of actions.

But if one actually forces this idea of self-conservation into reality as the only means to fight against the crisis, this will actually lead to serious consequences. The world is highly interweaved nowadays; and one's attempts to seclude oneself from global action will not succeed; for instance, most Americans consume products manufactured in China; and this is one of the world powers to dialogically come to terms with (and we do not to mention here lesser powers such as Somalian pirates imprisoning American cargo ships or Russian leaders not being able to take care of the weapon-grade plutonium waste lying near Ural mountains in huge amounts—enough to destroy the entire world several times in a row).

There is no way to avoid the world and to become autistic and private again; there is no way for America or any other country to retreat into its previous monological autism... We are all too interconnected now. No freaking way you can take care of your own backyard before you take care of the planet; you have to do it simultaneously with setting priorities that are actually global (and highly sophisticated), otherwise everything built without a necessary awareness will fall apart (in a sense, your backyard is a part of the global backyard called the Earth). It especially relates to the US because it became so dominant in the world in the second half of the 20th century; there is just no way to regress back into the cave after Americans have engulfed the entire world with their capitalistic system, worldview, and action.

(I would add here that one of the examples of everything falling apart is contemporary Russia which is said to be reigned, as Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, somewhat biliously formulated, by a "bunch of cowboys," the cowboys, I would add, who are basically incapable of single-handedly tackling the complex societal issues; hence, the suffering of the entire nation and a demise of an important, if neglected, sociocultural part of the European civilization. It will probably take the entire world to rebuild Russia and re-integrate its people into the global community; and now I sense that Russia is predominantly seen as a mean but persistent distraction and disturbance to the Western rationalistic plans for global peace and paradise. So much attention is paid to Africa now; but doesn't Russia deserve an equal amount of attention—or even more attention, given its difficult history, its influence in the world, and the multiple ways it is still being marginalized/ignored/oppressed both by the West and the East? I remind you that statistically and qualitatively Russia is probably not in a better shape than Nigeria; right now people are suffering in both places enormously—more than any human being in the world deserves—even if they are suppressing the suffering into the personal and collective unconscious and making themselves numb to and detached from their own pains.)

The global economic crisis as well as the global climatic change as well as many other global issues are positively not the national-level issues. They may have causes in each country's poor and imbalanced choice of politics and strategy over a certain period in history, but the systemic resolution of the global economic crisis requires a paradigm of global actions. Global climate change, or in general a worsening of environmental conditions due to industrialization and natural disasters that is undeniably occurring, is a vivid example of why taking care of one's own backyard first doesn't work: there is no point of trying to save your attachment to your home if the entire world is going to collapse. You can take care of grass in your backyard but the acid rain or radioactive waste will prove all your private efforts futile.

We ought to let go of being so much obsessed with privacy.