Authority and Wikipedia

[WeeWilly]

[This is another long essay.  If it is rather clumsy, so be it!  I would be delighted to hear your thoughts - not so much about the essay as the concepts in it, and about the action of Wikileaks.]

It surprises me that no-one on this forum has commented on Wikileaks' recently publishing the spate of war documents (the “War Diary").  As for me, I take my hat off to Wikipedia for their actions!  As may be evident by now to you that know me, I am something of an anarchist in that I am highly suspicious of anything which Authority (ie, those in power) tells me, manages for me, edits for me, or censors for me.  Above all, save us from having Authority manage "what is good for us".

This suspicion has been vindicated - if, indeed, vindication is needed - by the content of these latest "leaked" documents.  Most of us - and I certainly include myself here - would be hard-pressed to put the Afghan war into any sort of reasonable context.  I have no idea of what a victory in this war would look like.  Indeed, I wonder if anyone could clearly define, for us Westerners, the ideal end position of this war.  And that this should be so elusive to us is UTTERLY RIDICULOUS!  We have young people (men, mostly) giving up their wee lives - not to be so crass as to mention the 100's of billions we are spending - for something that is so ill-defined that we (or most of us?) cannot begin to enunciate what we are trying to achieve!  Why are we doing this for a country that seems to be filled with loonies who appear to want to die for half-baked objectives that are utterly meaningless, except perhaps to a collection of superstitious primordial savages?  Surely, before we ask anyone actually to lay down his life here, we should be able to tell him what it is for.  And, moreover, it had better be a DAMNED GOOD REASON!

These leaked documents show how clearly the official spin (newspeak for official "lies") is at odds with reality.  And we should be concerned, even very concerned, by this.

Remember "Lord of the Flies".  As I have argued elsewhere, if you isolate a group of people (to wit, a Society) for a time, very soon the members of that Society separate themselves into two groups, a small group of those who want to control the Society (ie, the "Leaders", maybe 5%) and those who are content to give control to that small group (the "Mass", the other 95%).  The Mass is not necessarily composed of sheep and lambs; they are only those who can't be bothered to deal with and to organize the necessities of life that constitute the infrastructure that supports any functioning society.  Per se, this work is mundane and uninteresting, and does not particularly recommend itself to thinking people who want a more meaningful occupation.  And so, the Mass willingly hands to the Leaders the ability to act, and this means, the capability to exercise control.

The evil is that the Leaders now constitute an entity that has all the characteristics of any other living entity, and its first priority is to insure its own continuance and to exploit all it can to do this. The insidious machinations begin when the Leaders realize that Society’s permission to manage infrastructure have handed them something that readily transforms into reigns of power.  So, with these reigns of power, in obedience to the drive of any living entity to survive, the Leaders immediately set up a new and insidious function that the Mass did not give them and which the Mass never intended them to have – the functions connected with insuring their own continuance – and thus is born Authority.  This self-survival drive soon inundates every aspect of the operation of Authority and influences everything it does and says (and does not say), and, because the Mass gave them the reigns of power, they have the means to dominate.  In short, Authority now has the reigns of power and it has no intention of giving them up!

So, for Authority, self-survival rapidly becomes its number one function, and anything unfriendly to Authority is, willy-nilly, an enemy of Authority.   The problem is that the interests of the Mass and Authority hardly ever run together, and within any society, Authority and the Mass have, at best, an uneasy relationship, and at worst , a hostile one.  Indeed, the freedoms that are sought by members of the Mass are often hostile – sometimes very hostile indeed – to Authority, which will act quickly to subdue anything that it sees as hostile.

This is the situation with so much of what we see all about us in political authority, within corporations, within churches, in security organizations, in educational institutes, within the legal profession, and so on.  Once any group or subgroup takes on an identity, its first priority is to provide for its own continuance.

A very insidious Authority is found in our political leaders (the most insidious and powerful Authority is the legal profession, and our political structure is actually only a subset of that).   Believe me, members of the Mass have no "inalienable" rights or freedoms whatsoever, because Authority can usurp them, will usurp them, and has usurped them whenever it wants to, without let or hindrance.  Examples abound, but a very chilling one was the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII.  These people were full Americans, with all the attendant "inalienable rights", but they were locked up without process,  pause or mercy.  So much for inalienable rights.  In the mid-70's during the FLQ crisis, Canadian Authority invoked led the War Measues Act (ie, the "spin") to set aside civil rights so that suspected FLQ terrorist could be incarcerated without the regular legal process.  The USA's current anti-terrorist policies and measures are another example simply removing or reducing individual "inalienable" rights and freedoms.   
 
And this brings us to WikiLeaks, a voice for the Mass.  It has committed a no-no in doing something that Authority has not sanctioned, that is a huge threat to Authority, and which Authority does not find pleasing!  Thus Authority is now fuming about WikiLeaks, saying that it has acted irresponsibly, that it had no authority to publish this “leaked” information, that has placed soldiers in danger by publishing, and so on. 

However, the Mass might take a very different view, perhaps with a great deal more to substantiate it.  The Mass might claim that Authority has wanonly placed these poor soldiers in danger, that it has done so under false pretenses,  that it is carrying out a battle under false pretenses, and that it has motives understood by (and perhaps of value to) only Authority..  The Mass might claim that it is time to reel in Authority and make it answerable to the Mass in the way that was “originally anticipated”.

In passing, it is worth noting that exactly the same mechanisms are undoubtedly at work among the enemy in Afghanistan, with its Authority tugging on its reigns of power, dictating to its mass, threatening the families who do not give up their children for suicide bombing, and so on!. 

And this is the stuff of conflict and war.  You know as well as I do that, as with any war, the overwhelming percentage of these soldiers - on both sides - really want nothing to do with the war, and if there were no Authority busy with furthering its own interests, the battles would never take place  As I've said before, most people, given a chance, want to live their wee lives in peace and comfort, with a bit of interest thrown in!  It is only the interest of those in power (my "Authority") that gets in the way of this. 

Wikileaks has struck a blow for the Mass, and it is a good blow indeed, for it properly challenges and chastises Authority that, ultimately, is supposed to be there to serve our interests.  The truth is that Authority has come out of this looking like a lying bunch of shites!