The Cato Institute’s recent 2023 national survey on central bank digital currency (CBDC) yielded troubling findings about younger Americans’ affinity for government surveillance within their own homes. Nearly a third (29 percent) of those age 18–29 support “‘the government installing surveillance cameras in every household’ in order to ‘reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity,’” the Cato Institute reports. This figure is more than twice as large as that for the general population: 14 percent. (The Cato survey asked about support for at-home government surveillance to see if this view was correlated with approval of CBDC; it did find correlation.)
Racial minorities ordinarily skeptical of law enforcement are more likely to endorse such surveillance: 33 percent of African Americans and 25 percent of Hispanics, as opposed to 11 percent of Asian Americans and 9 percent of white Americans. Marginally more Democrats are supportive than Republicans: 17 percent versus 11 percent, respectively. A striking political result is that those self-identified “very liberal” Democrats are less likely (9 percent) than “liberal” Democrats (17 percent) to support the scheme. Ironically, progressives who want larger government to circumvent property rights and carry out wealth transfers seem less comfortable with the state’s violating privacy. Perhaps they don’t see how empowering the state to engage in the former entails the latter.
While the racial and political breakdown is unexpected, the generational results are not altogether shocking. Consider the lack of college-student opposition to Covid-19 policies. I documented students’ willingness to subordinate themselves to totalitarian invasions of privacy at Dartmouth College with colleagues in a series of videos for the Dartmouth Political Times. There were no demonstrations en masse against the stay-in-dorm orders. Not even when those who dared to convene outdoors were caught by a taskforce consisting of the Hanover, N.H. police department and Dartmouth’s own Safety and Security force, a.k.a. “SnS” (renamed to the Department of Safety and Security, a.k.a. “DoSS,” after student mockery). Nor was there any large-scale protesting when those students were then forced to leave campus and attend classes virtually at home. Given young people’s submission to innumerable violations of privacy and autonomy during Covid, supposedly for the sake of safety, dismay at Cato’s findings is warranted; surprise is not.
The survey did not ask whether respondents would support surveillance cameras even in bedrooms. But this is a logical conclusion of the safety-over-privacy argument. It is not unreasonable to imagine that such surveillance would marginally decrease the incidence of sexual assault — if men know that their bedroom behavior is recorded 24/7, surely many more would ask for active and affirmative consent. But I’m confident conjecturing that few would endorse government agents installing GoPros in bedframes.
So if monitoring can improve public safety (if only by increasing the perceived costs of misbehavior), why do most people still oppose such invasions of their privacy? The answer is simple: Safety is not the ultimate good. For human life to have meaning, man must have the ability to choose, even to choose wrongly. Once somebody exercises his autonomy in a way that contravenes another’s, he must bear the responsibility and consequences of doing so. This is why the criminal-justice system exists. But to preemptively violate people’s privacy before any crime has been committed is to enter a Minority Report–style panopticon inimical to freedom and, consequently, flourishing. It is disturbing that even a minority of my generation should find this desirable.