Forum: Are fear of shame, pride what drive privacy obsession?

Published 1:30 am Saturday, July 26, 2025

By Dan Hazen / Herald Forum

During a recent meeting my health care provider greeted me warmly as I took my seat, opened a file folder and asked: “What is your last name and date of birth please?”

The air sort of left the room. Her demeanor changed ever-so-slightly from professional hospitality to mild suspicion. She was prepared for me to give an incorrect answer and rapidly switch gears again to threat assessment. The sacred temple of privacy might be defiled. It was weird.

Privacy has become a pseudo-virtue in the health care space, but technology has elevated its prominence in almost every space. Conventional wisdom says that your identity has already been stolen by bad actors and the only reason you’re not experiencing bank fraud right now is that they haven’t gotten to your file; yet.

But it seems these very real technological threats to privacy don’t constitute most of what drives our growing obsession with it. There’s something else at work too. In seeking an answer to what that “something else” might be, I deploy a diagnostic tool used in logical thought: Proof by contradiction, which admittedly has weaknesses, but stick with me.

Doctors use a version of proof by contradiction. If a blood test reveals a high white blood cell count, cancer is suspected. The presence of a solution points to an otherwise unseen problem. So, what does the presence of “obsessive privacy” indicate in the patient that is society?

I propose that the disease is fear of shame.

Obsessive privacy swelled in the 1990s with the advent of digital medical records and the threat that our sexually transmitted diseases, mental health disorders, cosmetic procedures, contraception, abortions and gender altering surgeries would become known — and used against us — because these sorts of things are considered shameful by society in the main. Nobody was worried about records of migraines or broken toes getting out because nobody cares. It’s the salacious stuff that privacy is about.

Obsessive privacy, then, is an indicator of explosive growth in our collective fear of shame. Additionally, proof by contradiction reveals another indicator: pride. As a people, we are more driven by self-esteem, empowerment and individualism than ever before. We just wrapped up another pride month when corporations display their willingness to regurgitate any propaganda which leads to profit, and no one can ask exactly what we’re all supposed to be “proud” of without simultaneously violating someone else’s privacy. Why is that?

“The lady doth protest too much me thinks,” as Shakespeare wrote.

Trump arrives on the scene bringing a brand of pride not seen since the last fascist uprisings of the 1930s. Both his cartoonish bravado (pride) and moral cowardice toward criticism (privacy) grow in the same feted soil. Pride and privacy: two things that don’t usually occur together except when the patient is suffering with fear of shame.

Fear of shame causes a panic response in which we seize anything to protect ourselves, even things that are incongruent; things that actually make it worse. It’s like the instinct to run when you’re on fire. Our Western progressive empire is fully engulfed, and pride and privacy have us running pell-mell toward the precipice.

But here’s the point: What if finally, we have nothing to fear? What if shame isn’t all-together bad? What if there’s a kind of shame that directly leads to the truth and transparency we want, but without the theater, violence and expense of pride and privacy?

What if we stopped twisting our brokenness to appear whole or hide it from each other? What if Disney is wrong and it’s not about “being who I choose to be despite every shred of evidence to the contrary and the chaos it unleashes”?

What if it’s not all about me?

What if I’m part of something bigger that suffers when I ignore it to indulge my own fictional, shame-phobic identity? What if shame is simply the pain impulse calling me back to a community that I abandoned (it didn’t abandon me) and needs me to adapt (at least a little) for everyone’s benefit?

If we began to tell the truth about ourselves to ourselves and others, if we stopped avoiding shame at all costs, maybe healing could take place.

“The ‘frankness’ of people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness.” — C.S. Lewis

Dan Hazen lives in Marysville and works in Everett.