"Security" has been hyped into the stratosphere lately, not only by burglar-alarm salespeople, but mostly by politicians as a key ingredient in their smokescreens. Leaving aside the understandable personal desire for a room of one's own, the bleat of security has been used to tear-gas the population in attempts to effect a siege mentality among its members.

The more effectively that people's imaginations may be tapped to conjure up shadowy villains or dark emotions, the easier it is for those promoting the unease to then step into the throngs of the paralyzed and subdue them to a political fait accompli. The myth of security is evidenced by the fact that now, just as much as in the last century, most people are continuously at the mercy of social forces from anywhere in the world, coalesced by politico-economic motives and ease of execution.

The continual shifting of importance to abstract, unelaborated concepts of 'security' is aided by the obsessive redividing of space according to the logic of private ownership. The worldwide use of property lines changes our objective world and reinforces the overarching edict of provincialism in people's minds. Instead of encouraging the globalization of social interchange (and, no, business lunches aren't for everybody), the security mindset promotes alienation by getting individuals to eschew casual social relations in favor of beefing up the homestead.

Moreover, as personal experience in participation with like-minded people proves, the vulnerability of channels of communication to interception and tampering is not nearly as great a liability as the orientation and motives of the participants themselves.

As with all social groupings, the success of an enterprise hinges not on the tightness of its membrane, but on the momentum created by the majority of its participants swimming upstream. Would-be spies, as a minority, are reduced to apeing the culture of struggle that they have to operate in. If they stay too long within its folds they risk understanding it and developing sympathy for it. In the meantime they will suffer from the muteness of passivity, always being forced to think on the defensive, waiting for a golden moment to somehow disrupt a hoped-for agent of logistical coordination.

Those who are most concerned with issues of security are, one, psychologically insecure by definition, and two, probably hiding something from themselves as vulnerable, abused children are known to do.