Everyone keeps secrets, everyone acts selfishly, and everyone keeps at least some aspect of their lives private. According to these mantras and the ideas of The Circle, doing these things is wrong and hurtful to society, but I disagree with them having any traction in real life. When Mae and Eamon Bailey first discuss these values together in Bailey’s office, Mae is quick to defend the use of secrets, but Bailey continues to make attempts to disprove Mae’s arguments. While he does succeed in making Mae agree with him, I see holes in his arguments. In this discussion, Mae says, “There are definitely things you don’t want your parents to know,” and Eamon responds with, “Would your parents want to know these things?” (285). He says this with the clear intention that he’s looking for the answer yes, but I don’t disagree with him on this one. Though I’m not a parent myself, I highly doubt most parents would like to know just what their children are up to on college campuses. Sometimes, in the real world, it’s better not to know—they say that “ignorance is bliss” for a reason. In this case, keeping secrets may be telling lies, but neither party is hurt by the secrets that are kept.
The conversation continues to the discussion of gay people coming out and how that would benefit all gay people. Bailey says, “When millions of men and women came out of the closet, it made homosexuality not some mysterious so-called deviance but a mainstream life path,” which does hold some degree of validity (286). However, the expansion of this to believe that it is every gay person’s duty to come out in order to end persecution of gays is, in my opinion, a flawed argument. Yes, much of the time parents who were homophobic end up being accepting of their child’s sexuality, but there are social contexts where people still look down upon homosexuality. If you compare the idea of homophobia to racism, it would make sense where the argument fails. Individuals can’t really hide their race most of the time, yet people are still openly racist knowing individuals of other racists. Maybe sharing everyone’s sexuality would help many people and end direct prosecution, but it would not end discrimination and homophobia. In this case, sharing may be caring, but it’s also dangerous for the individual.
Finally, the idea that privacy is theft came out of the conversation between Mae and Bailey, and that each individual’s experiences should be accessible by anyone who might want to have the same experience. In Bailey’s words, “everyone should have a right to know everything, and should have the tools to know anything,” although his basis for this belief is completely around fairness (288). While I don’t disagree that it would be nice to have the ability witness any incredible experience anyone has ever had, I don’t think an argument based simply on fairness can hold. It may be unfair that I can travel the world while others can’t afford to, but my particular experiences are my own. What makes certain memories so powerful is their privacy and the fact that it is your own memory. I’ve never felt as much looking at a picture of a place as I have actually standing there. Overall, I can understand the emotions behind these statements and their connection to real life, but I definitely don’t believe in them or think they are valid.