The WikiLeaks disclosure of diplomatic cables this week has stirred strong feelings in millionsof people, and many of those feelings run deep. So deep, in fact, that many of us fail to understand them. They trouble us and irritate us, but we are not very clear as to why.
The first few days of this have been rather shocking: When do Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton agree on anything? But they are both furious with Julian Assange. Offers are being placed upon his head, Interpol has placed him on its Wanted list, and pundits world-wide are raging.
When animus runs deeper than politics in the modern world (when anything runs deeper than politics in the modern world), it is worth stopping for a moment to consider it. As someone who has given years of study to this subject, I will postulate a primary reason, which is this:
WikiLeaks exposes the truth of how institutions really operate, and many of us don’t want to know. We need not to know.
If we are forced to see how governments actually behave, we will have to admit that they are morally inferior to ourselves… and most of us need to avoid that thought. We are happy to complain about one party or another, one faction or another, but we need to see the uber-structure as a nearly sacred thing. But the more that WikiLeaks uncovers, the less we can retain that illusion. The all-too-common reaction is that this must be forbidden, and thus WikiLeaks must be stopped.
WHY SHOULD THIS BE SO?
Most of us work long and hard to find the truth in our daily lives. We want to know if we are getting a good deal in business, if our kids are behaving, or if our relatives are misbehaving. My argument above, however, says that people don’t want to know the truth. So, how can this be right, if we all seek the truth nearly all the time?
The answer is simply that government is different. It is seen as a superior entity… and an entity whose superiority we rely upon. If you are tempted to think that this is a silly idea, look back in time a few hundred years: How many of us relied on the inherent moral superiority of the Church? How many of us were happy to point out the foibles of the local priest or abbey, but then said, “if only His Holiness knew”? We held the structure itself to be a superior entity, and we relied upon that superiority.
The parallels are precise.
I explained this phenomenon at some length in a book of history I wrote two years ago, called Production Versus Plunder. In it, I described a Great Trade between people and the powers that ruled them. That Great Trade was and is this:
The state and/or church presents themselves to men as a superior entity –higher than man. To be joined to them provides sanction from a higher source than that of their internal conflicts.
In our times we often hear this expressed in this way: People need to belong to something larger than themselves. They need to sublimate their confusion and conflicts into a higher entity.
Humans are internally conflicted beings. Whether we blame this upon evolution, the fall of Adam, or something else, we all know that conflict is inherent in human nature, and we all act to deal with it: We spend significant portions of our lives in churches or synagogues, reading books or watching self-help television, in a psychologist’s office, or discussing our problems with our friends. The fact is inarguable.
It is also inarguable that mass institutions have secured the reverence of men and women through all of recorded history. Whether church, state, a god-king or some other variation, human history is dominated by devotion to the institution. And there is a reason for this: The larger entity gives us absolution for our internal conflicts. We may be conflicted and confused, but at least we are a patriot, or a son of the church, or a proud black man, or…
Under the Great trade, our internal conflicts become lost as we are subsumed into the uber-entity. It is the great assurance, and it is ever-so-easy to accept, since perhaps every human you’ve ever known has done the same. This trade is the magic secret of politics and of rulership. People wanted the Divine Right of Kings. They need to think of their Leader as a superior being. Rulers and politicians merely play their roles as public theater.
WikiLeaks is removing this illusion. They are exposing the fact that the uber-entity is not morally superior. It is composed of your silly neighbors and behaves just as badly… or worse.
WHY WE EVADE THIS KNOWLEDGE
Why wouldn’t someone want to know that he or she was morally superior to the uber-entities that manipulate their lives? For one simple reason: If the uber-entity is not superior, responsibility reverts to themselves. So, it is preferable to avoid this choice, unless you have the stomach for heroics.
I DO NOT CONDEMN
Please do not think that I am criticizing people for evading this choice. We have all been raised under one version or another of the Great Trade. We have seen very few people (if any) that rejected it. It has seems a force of nature to us. Noetheless, the Great Trade is based upon a lie – that the uber-entity is morally superior – and WikiLeaks is exposing that lie. (If this exposure is mishandled by Assange and his team, it remains that the lie of the Great Trade is being exposed. Such errors are irrelevant to this point.) Most of us have, in fact, spent a great deal of time and energy improving ourselves. In fact, many of us no longer need the Great Trade. We have outgrown it. The hundreds of hours we’ve spent in self-analysis have not been in vain.
There’s not a state on this planet that is morally superior to a decent man or woman. WikiLeaks is publicizing that fact, and those of us who have developed ourselves to any significant degree should accept that truth. We can handle it.
