We have to find places that we protect away from government so

"We have to find places that we protect away from government so that we can all be the unique and interesting and, in my case, somewhat deviant people we'd like to be." Thus spoke Alexander Karp, philosopher and technologist, a man whose work bridges the realms of intellect, innovation, and power. His words carry both humility and warning — a reflection on the fragile balance between freedom and authority, between the individual and the state. In this declaration, Karp calls not merely for resistance, but for preservation — the safeguarding of spaces where the human spirit may live unobserved, unregulated, and unbroken. For though government may serve order, it is within the ungoverned corners of the mind and heart that true creativity, individuality, and truth are born.

Karp, the co-founder of Palantir Technologies, is a man who knows both the power and peril of data — the modern coin of control. He has built tools that serve governments and defend nations, yet he remains wary of what happens when governance sees too deeply into the private lives of its citizens. His statement springs from that tension: the recognition that technology, once a servant of freedom, can also become its warden. “We must find places,” he warns, “that we protect away from government” — sanctuaries of thought and being that no bureaucracy may penetrate. For when surveillance becomes absolute, individuality withers. The soul, knowing it is watched, learns to conform; and from that conformity arises the slow death of originality.

His words are a plea for the preservation of privacy, but not privacy alone. They speak of something greater — the sanctity of difference. In the modern world, the pressure to align, to speak safely, to think as others do, grows ever stronger. Karp reminds us that it is the right, even the duty, of free people to remain unique and interesting, even deviant, in a society that seeks to measure and normalize all things. This “deviance,” as he calls it with irony and pride, is not corruption but courage — the courage to be fully oneself in a world that prizes obedience.

History teaches that every age of tyranny begins with the loss of private space. In the days of Socrates, the philosopher’s questions threatened the Athenian state not because they broke laws, but because they stirred minds. The city, fearing his influence, chose silence over dialogue and condemned him to drink the hemlock. Likewise, in the dark centuries that followed, rulers sought to crush heresy, to police thought, to make the citizen an echo of the crown. Yet always there were those who withdrew — the monks who copied books in secret, the thinkers who whispered in exile, the artists who painted truth beneath the veil of allegory. They carved places protected from government — sanctuaries of conscience — and from those places, civilization was reborn.

In Karp’s age, the challenge has changed, but the danger remains. The modern state does not need spies in every home when every device in every hand reveals the story of our lives. The invisible gaze of algorithms watches what we read, where we travel, what we love, and even what we fear. In this new order, freedom is not taken by force; it is surrendered in comfort. The citizen, lulled by convenience, forgets that to be unseen is also to be safe, that to be private is to be sovereign. Karp’s call is therefore not rebellion but remembrance — a reminder that liberty cannot live where the individual has no place to think freely, to err freely, to dream without oversight.

The meaning of his words, then, is a defense of the human spirit — the unpredictable, imperfect, wondrous spark that makes civilization worth governing at all. Government is necessary, but it must have limits. The people must guard a realm beyond its reach — the sacred space of conscience, of creativity, of dissent. For from these ungoverned realms come the ideas that renew the world: the art that questions, the science that transforms, the truth that unsettles the comfortable. A state that fears such freedom fears its own vitality.

The lesson, timeless and urgent, is this: each person must cultivate and protect their inner frontier. Create spaces — in thought, in home, in community — where power cannot follow. Value privacy not as secrecy, but as dignity. Cherish difference; defend the right to be strange, bold, and unapproved. And above all, resist the temptation to surrender freedom for safety, or individuality for acceptance. For as long as there exist corners of the world where the spirit can stand apart from authority, humanity remains free.

So remember the wisdom of Alexander Karp: that we must guard places beyond the reach of government, not to defy law, but to preserve life’s richest essence — the freedom to be ourselves. Let us build and protect those spaces — not only in hidden rooms or encrypted systems, but in the courage of our minds. For only when the human spirit stands beyond the grasp of power can it remain what it was always meant to be — unique, interesting, and gloriously, defiantly free.