MCViewPoint

We can only begin fighting this from where we’re at. None of us individually have the power to rip the veil of secrecy away from the empire, but we do each individually have the ability to call out its lies where they can be seen and help wake people up to the fact that we’re being deceived and manipulated.

Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

I saw a video clip of Julian Assange speaking in London in 2010 where he made an important observation while explaining the philosophy behind his work with WikiLeaks. He said that all our political theories are to some extent “bankrupt” in our current situation, because our institutions are so shrouded in secrecy that we can’t even know what’s really going on in the world.

“We can all write about our political issues, we can all push for particular things we believe in, we can all have particular brands of politics, but I say actually it’s all bankrupt,” Assange said. “And the reason it’s all bankrupt, and all current political theories are bankrupt and particular lines of political thought, is because actually we don’t know what the hell is going on. And until we know the basic structures of our institutions — how they operate in practice, these titanic organizations, how they behave inside, not just through stories but through vast amounts of internal documentations — until we know that, how can we possibly make a diagnosis? How can we set the direction to go until we know where we are? We don’t even have a map of where we are. So our first task is to build up a sort of intellectual heritage that describes where we are. And once we know where we are, then we have a hope of setting course for a different direction. Until then, I think all political theories — to greater and lesser extents of course — are bankrupt.”

It’s an extremely important point if you think about it: how can we form theories about how our governments should be operating when we have no idea how they are currently operating? How can a doctor prescribe the correct treatment when he hasn’t yet made a diagnosis?

Political theories are in this sense “bankrupt”, because they are formed in the dark, without our being able to see precisely what’s happening and what’s going wrong.

The nature of our institutions is hidden from us, and that includes not only our government institutions but the political, media, corporate and financial institutions which control so much of our society. Their nature is hidden not only by a complete lack of transparency but by things like propaganda, internet censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the fact that all the most loudly amplified voices in our society are those who more or less support status quo politics.

The fact that all the most important aspects of our civilization’s operation are hidden, manipulated and obfuscated by the powerful makes a joke of the very idea of democracy, because how can people know what government policies to vote for if they can’t even clearly see those policies? How can people know what to vote for when everything about their understanding of the world is being actively distorted for the benefit of the powerful?

See the rest here

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