Remember the first time you saw Barack Obama?

If you’re like most Americans, it was roughly four and a half years ago at the Democratic National Convention. I refer you now to one line in particular of that historic speech:

“We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States.”

There is a reason the confidentiality of library records is sacrosanct: it is because the use of them for government intelligence virtually guarantees an imposition on civil liberties.

When we think about going to the library and checking out a John Grisham or a Stephen King, it’s hard to imagine what all the fuss is about. But imagine instead that you’re interested in religion and you check out a Bible or a religious reference book. Now imagine that instead of a Bible, you check out the Koran.

There are millions of versions of this scenario. You love planes and you check out a book to see how jetliners work — now imagine you’re of Middle Eastern descent. You’re fascinated with serial killers. Your friend David recommends Devil in the White City. You’re a student of human behavior and pick up a copy of The Lucifer Effect. Any one of these situations could imply suspicious activity — and, in more than 99% of cases, that suspicion would be dead wrong.

In the book Free Expression and Censorship In America, Herbert Foerstel describes the FBI’s attempts to monitor communist activity through the library system:

At [the University of Maryland, College Park], the agents asked librarians to report on anyone with a “foreign-sounding name or foreign accent” who used the libraries. Such a characterization would fit the majority of students and faculty on most American campuses, yet librarians were asked to monitor reference questions and on-line literature searches, including searches of [the National Technical Information Service], in order to establish the subject interests of these suspicious foreigners. All of this surveillance was conducted despite the fact that the UMCP libraries contained no classified materials, and their collections were presumably open to anyone. When the university complained about the surveillance, an FBI representative claimed that the libraries should feel no obligation to protect the access and privacy rights of noncitizens.

This backstory is why I was glad to see that a court is allowing a lawsuit against Blockbuster to proceed. The lawsuit is backlash from Blockbuster’s participation in Facebook’s ill-conceived Beacon program, which shared user purchase activity across the social network.

Just like libraries, it may seem that the potential harm from this program is minimal. You rent a copy of Wild Things, and the next thing you know your out-of-town girlfriend spots it on your News Feed and you’re having to explain yourself. But just like library books, movies can be an indication of who we are. Unfortunately, they are symptoms that point in a million different directions — symptoms that carry with them a potential for misinterpretation as tempting as a serpent’s apple.

We are eternally trying to find the right balance between freedom and security. Thankfully, books and other media coexist with speech firmly on the ‘freedom’ side of the line. Let’s keep it that way.

What do you think?

Alex Madison and Lisa Harmon from Email Insider have written two articles (one and two) on the shift from valuing left-brain attributes to valuing right-brain attributes. The pieces were inspired by the new Daniel H. Pink book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule The Future.

Say Madison and Harmon, ‘In his innovative book… Daniel H. Pink argues that our world has shifted from “left brain” dominance to the reign of right-brain thinkers: designers, inventors, teachers and storytellers. He deems this era “The Conceptual Age.”‘

Bravo. I’m delighted that empathy, play and meaning are coming into their own. Likewise, it’s about time businesses recognized the importance of design, story and symphony. Bring on the right brain!

At the same time, I find it interesting that the book is (probably intentionally) titled, ‘A Whole New Mind’. I haven’t read the book, so I’m not presuming to rebut its contents; instead, I’d like to explore a bit our human tendency to polarize.

When we polarize, we seek an extreme. We reduce the world to distinct categories, and then we elect from those categories: left or right, male or female, conventional or organic. We succumb to the ‘tyranny of the OR’ described by Collins and Porras in Built to Last.

The world we live in provides ample fuel for this tendency. It obligingly splits itself up into night and day, north and south, up and down. It practically begs us to choose sides.

If we pay close attention, though, we start to notice what philosophers and poets and gurus have observed throughout the millenia: that no thing exists without its opposite. Without night, day is meaningless; without north, south is meaningless; without up, down is meaningless. Yin contains yang and yang contains yin. Our world is the wholeness that contains all of our extremes.

The left brain — that logical, rational, emotionless creature — is what gives us the power to analyze, to reason, to plan, to calculate. It allows us to pay our bills, buy our houses, send our kids to college. None of these things are bad things.

The right brain — that creative, playful, feeling creature — is what gives us the power to explore, to dream, to invent, to transform. It allows us to find meaning, intuit connections, appreciate beauty. None of these things are bad things.

I prefer to live a life in which I can appreciate beauty AND pay the bills. I prefer to live a life in which I can plan ahead AND experience spontaneous joy. I don’t believe these things are mutually exclusive.

The research done by VortexDNA, whose technology powers the Web Genome Project, shows that companies that pay equal attention to all their stakeholders — customers, staff, shareholders, community and society — consistently outperformed companies that had a disproportionate focus on any subset. I would argue that the same need for equal attention exists for individuals, and that we use our brains to greatest effect when we use them whole-mindedly.

It’s wrong to say that the right brain is more important or the left brain is more important. The only ‘right’ brain is the whole brain.

Do you use your whole brain?