Google’s informal motto is “Don’t be evil”. The interesting thing, though, is that anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of hypnosis, and how the unconscious processes language, understands that our deepest recesses cannot hear negatives. They will process this as “be evil”. This is simple hypnotic fact. If you say “Don’t speak” when someone is in a deep trance, people will speak.
This, in any event, is my understanding.
I will add that most Germans under Hitler, and quite likely a very high percentage of the denizens of Communist regimes-after all the talented individuals had been arrested, killed, or tortured into submission–accepted the status quo. Given the choice of freedom in the United States, Ayn Rand’s sister returned to the Soviet Union.
Freedom only means anything when you are not in lockstep with your neighbors. If you do not value individuality, if you do not relish the struggles of personal growth, if you do not value a tradition or path which is out of the mainstream, then you do not need what the rest of us call freedom. Your freedom is a cage, and someone who will always tell you what to do and what to think.
It is an empirically documented fact that in totalitarian regimes people can get addicted to propaganda. They know on some level that it is between misleading and outright lies, but they can’t live without it. It synchronizes them. It soothes them. I would submit that in the present United States, we are quite advanced along this path. Matt Lauer is a congenial person–or knows how to present himself as one–but we continue to borrow 40% of the massive sums that the Federal government is spending. We continue to allow Obama to trample the law. We continue to tolerate all of the precursors of a perfect police state. Nobody wants to hear about any of these things, or if they are made unavoidable by the fact that Fox continues to tell at least some of the truth, people want the stories sanitized. They WANT to be lied to, and there are plenty of folks out there only too happy to oblige them.
I would question whether they allow actual individualists at Google, or whether one would want to work there. No doubt there is great diversity of clothing, “lifestyle”, race (of course), but I wonder how well accepted anyone would be who considers abortion to be not a choice, but the murder of an unborn child that IS qualitatively different from the removal of a gallstone or wisdom tooth. How well accepted would someone be who values their religion–which teaches that homosexuality is wrong–over the culture we are all taught in school?