The Dead Past

 After reading Isaac Asimov’s novella The Dead Past, I came away with a reinforced conviction: when privacy disappears, human society collapses.

Yuval Noah Harari repeatedly emphasizes in his “Sapiens trilogy” that large-scale human cooperation is made possible because we can collectively believe in fictional stories. In his latest book Nexus, he argues that this “bond” holding human societies together is precisely these shared fictions. Jonathan Gottschall puts it even more bluntly in The Storytelling Animal: stories are what make human society possible.

Consider Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, widely revered as a paragon of virtue. Yet even this exceptionally honest and moral figure needed to claim “divine revelations from a forest nymph” in order to implement sweeping political and economic reforms. Likewise, Scipio Aemilianus—another figure celebrated for his character—was willing to manipulate sacred divination rituals to achieve his objectives. Unlike authoritarian rulers who rely on force, these gentle, virtuous leaders succeeded precisely because they employed narrative, symbol, and myth to legitimize their reforms.

Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy imagines the Trisolarans as a species with perfect telepathy, incapable of deception. But such a society collapses upon closer scrutiny. A world without privacy cannot produce myth, narrative, or shared symbolic structures—there can be no grand story binding millions together. Without fiction, there is no large-scale cohesion. This is exactly the predicament depicted in The Dead Past: a world where everyone owns a device that can replay anyone else’s history in perfect detail, obliterating the conditions necessary for civilization.

Privacy is not a flaw in society—it is the soil from which civilization grows. Without it, stories die, and with them, the world we know.