<\/p>\n
Human life differs <\/p>\n Biological adaptation Further, in the But ideas can Taking an example The Arab world is backward because it is Freer societies transformed the world Uncontrolled information in the hands of Organizations and those in positions of Historically powerful organizations have The free institutions that made the gifts In undemocratic Our rapidly Do governments and A free media At a national Wikileaks fills a This is why Will there be Wikileaks is doing We are very We might end up owing them even more. The modern world appears to be entering a time of severe crisis as we over-tax our environment. In the short run the corporate status quo benefits from this overtaxing, and its leaders have proven beyond doubt the short run is all that matters to them. We will need all the creativity and adaptivity we can muster if the next 100 years are to be as good for most people as the previous 100. Destroying their control over information might be essential to the well-being of humanity. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Human life differs from the rest of earthly life in one crucial respect: biological evolution has largely taken second place to cultural evolution. Cultural evolution enables adaptations within a single generation that would take thousands of generations if brought about biologically, if they were possible at all. We are the beneficiaries. Below the fold I will…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-social-and-political-theory"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nfrom the rest of earthly life in one crucial respect: biological evolution has
\nlargely taken second place to cultural evolution. Cultural evolution enables adaptations
\nwithin a single generation that would take thousands of generations if brought
\nabout biologically, if they were possible at all. We are the beneficiaries. <\/span>Below the fold I will show how this basic truth about human
\nlife <\/span>demonstrates the importance
\nof Wikileaks.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\noccurs through the reproduction of life forms, or their extinction. <\/span>Cultural evolution occurs through the
\nreproduction or extinction of ideas, leaving the life forms free to adapt
\nwithout extinction. <\/span>Only the most
\nrapidly reproducing <\/span>and adaptable life
\nforms, such as bacteria, annual weeds, and rats have proven able to truly
\nflourish in competition with social evolution.<\/p>\n
\nmodern world this adaptive information flow has increased far beyond anything
\nexisting earlier, leading to greater material prosperity, vastly lower deaths
\nin childhood and in giving birth, more choice in how to live a life, and
\nawareness of those choices, greater toleration for those who are different from
\nus, and on balance much longer lives. In modern societies the poor became a
\nminority group for the first time since the rise of agriculture and imperialism
\ndoes not explain it.<\/p>\n
\nfreely spread and adapt into better ideas and so better guides to action only
\nto the degree they are unhindered.
\n<\/span>The spread of relatively free societies facilitated the ever faster
\nsharing and evaluation of ideas, has triggered modern science, production, the
\narts, and much else. <\/span>Pre-modern
\nsocieties relied on far slower information networks that filtered out a great
\ndeal before many had a chance to encounter it. <\/span>It is no surprise they have fared poorly in competition with
\nthe modern world unless they are semi-monopolistic suppliers of crucial
\nresources they do not produce, like the Arab world.<\/p>\n
\nfrom the book I have been writing, today
\nIslamic societies remain intellectual, scientific, and economic
\nbackwaters<\/a>. <\/span>Arab nations
\ncollectively translate about 330 books annually, one fifth what small Greece
\naccomplishes. <\/span>With 5% of the
\nworld’s population, they have .5% of the world’s internet users, lagging behind
\nall other developing countries. The Arab world’s production of scientific
\npapers is about 2 per cent per million inhabitants of that of an industrialized
\ncountry. <\/span> <\/span> <\/span>In 2007 Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates each
\nregistered one patent, while Israel registered 25 and Switzerland 227.<\/span><\/p>\n
\ndifficult for people to acquire onformation and share it with others without
\npermission from those who benefit from the status quo. This was not always so. But when political and religious authoritarianism conquered the Arab world centuries ago, it began a process of stagnation that has yet to be overcome. <\/span>Big organizations benefiting from the
\nstatus quo have always and throughout history been the (not always intentional)
\nenemies of human flourishing.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nbecause far more than before, they enabled people to cooperate without needing
\npermission, and to gain access to information regardless of what others
\nthought. <\/span>But these gains cannot be
\ntaken for granted, as sadly they are today. <\/span>In reality freer societies have to continually push back
\nagainst the large organizations that arise within them because big
\norganizations want to control information. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nothers makes any organization’s survival less certain. <\/span>Therefore all big organizations without
\nexception incline to secrecy. <\/span>This
\ntendency is made stronger because within an organization a person’s power is
\nstrongly correlated to their control over information. <\/span>If I know what you need to know, I have
\npower over you. A rare person will act differently, but they are even more
\nrarely in positions of dominance for just that reason.<\/span><\/p>\n
\npower within them want as much information about others as they can get, while
\ngiving out as little information as possible. To the degree they succeed they
\nimpede social adaptation and learning.
\n<\/span>They promote stagnation and rigidity. <\/span>This is undesirable for everyone else, but it gets worse.<\/span><\/p>\n
\ndestroyed potential competitors – killed or imprisoned them – in order to
\npreserve their monopoly. <\/span>This is
\ntrue not only politically, but in the economy and in religion. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nof modernity available to most of us accomplished this by weakening anyone’s
\nability to control information or impede cooperation they do not control. <\/span>But organizations within the modern
\nworld still seek to control information and prevent competitors or alternatives
\nto relying on them. <\/span>This is
\ncentral to what an organization is, especially in government and business<\/i><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n
\ncountries these organizations have proven willing to kill millions to preserve
\ntheir power and domination. <\/span>In
\n“democratic” countries they do not possess a military and secret police able to
\nkill at wholesale levels, but they have proven to be just fine with people
\ndying to preserve their power and wealth.
\n<\/span>Consider the many thousands who died because big tobacco manipulated
\ninformation about tobacco’s health dangers to preserve their profits. <\/span>Or the “health” insurance companies who
\ntake a person’s money until they need the insurance, and then seek to find a
\nway to deny them because of “pre-existing conditions.” <\/span>Consider the bureaucracies which
\nperpetuate pointless wars because admitting they were wrong would not be good
\nfor leaders.<\/p>\n
\ncoalescing corporate financial political and military elite marks a step
\nbackwards for humanity because they are afraid of freedom, afraid of people
\nwith independent access to information and afraid of changes they do not
\ncontrol. <\/span>And so they seek to
\ncontrol everyone through manipulating and controlling information. <\/span>Some critics claim the information
\nWikileaks released was not all that important. <\/span>That’s partly true, and powerful evidence of what I am
\ntalking about. <\/span>They want to
\ncontrol ALL information. <\/span>If they
\nsucceed they will ultimately do to our society what Arab leaders did to theirs.\n<\/p>\n
\ncorporations need secrecy? <\/span>Most of
\nthe time my answer is NO. <\/span>We need
\nprivacy in our lives because it is essential to intimacy. <\/span>But why do we need secrecy in an
\norganization<\/i>? <\/span>To have power over someone who does not know what we
\nknow. <\/span>When governments know what
\ncitizens do not, that frees them from oversight. <\/span>Sometimes this is reasonable as with short-term military
\nplans in a war. <\/span>Usually it is
\ndeleterious to popular control and oversight. These days it almost always is.
\nBecause we do not have a free press despite it’s not being government owned.<\/span><\/p>\n
\npublishes what it’s editors think is newsworthy. <\/span>Some are better than others, but the network of free media
\nmeans that oversight is always present.
\n<\/span>Today most media is corporate, and most are owned by corporations having
\nimportant financial <\/span>dealings with
\ngovernment and products to market other than news. <\/span>Even if there were no conflicting financial interests on the
\npart of the corporation with telling the truth, if truth gets in the way of
\nprofit a corporation will not fight for a principle. <\/span>Profit matters more, and a CEO who puts principle before
\nprofit will become an ex-CEO. <\/span>With
\nfew exceptions investigative journalism has died in the US because it is not
\nprofitable.<\/p>\n
\nlevel the free press no longer significantly exists in the US. <\/span>Ask yourselves WHY the best informed<\/a>
\npeople who watch television and the news get their news from the Comedy
\nChannel. (This was not the only research to indicate this fact. <\/span>There is more<\/a>.) <\/span> <\/span> <\/span>Only the internet is free – and it
\nhas a problem supporting independent investigators because it is hard to make
\nmoney one it.<\/p>\n
\nhuge void. <\/span>It releases information
\nprovided by whistleblowers and so simplifies investigative journalism so that
\nit can exist again. <\/span>The people
\nmaking the leaks are not foreign agents.
\n<\/span>(If they were their governments would already know the information so
\nthere would be no need to release it.)
\n<\/span>Often they do it because they are appalled at what they see around them
\nand have conscience enough to act on it. The people who benefit are the
\ncitizens of the countries involved.<\/p>\n
\ngovernment and corporations conspired to close them down. <\/span>That a key institution by which
\ncitizens can communicate with one another can be so easily compromised shows
\nhow vulnerable our freedom is today. They have shown their true colors as
\noligarchs, gangsters, and thugs.
\n<\/span>As Wikileaks exposes them over and over expect more of the same.<\/p>\n
\nmistakes by Wikileaks? <\/span>I suppose
\nso, but not on the scale of the Iraq War, which was cheered on by a venal and
\ndishonest corporate media. <\/span>Over
\n100,000 people who never did us harm are dead, our civil liberties compromised,
\ntorture institutionalized, and America’s founding values tossed to the winds
\nbecause in large part of the media’s utter failure to do their job. <\/span>Nor did they learn from the experience. <\/span>The people most responsible for this
\nfailure still have their jobs.
\n<\/span>Some have been promoted.
\n<\/span>And the critics who were proven right are still not given access to the
\npublic.<\/p>\n
\nwhat the media is supposed to have done.
\n<\/span>Combined with the investigative energy of people who use the net, it is
\nmaking the efforts of our corrupt elite to control us more difficult while
\neducating those Americans able to care about their country to their true
\nvenality.<\/p>\n
\nfortunate they exist, we owe them a lot and we may ultimately owe them for the
\nrevival of real freedom and decency in America, should that come to pass. <\/p>\n