Padd Solutions

Converted by Falcon Hive


Having had a few garbled conversations with people where I've had to play the solitary role of a Wikileaks apologist, I'd like to do this systematically. (On a side note, who would have thought that it's Wikileaks that needs to have apologists, not the powerful organisations whose much more serious wrongdoings the former tries to uncover. This shows just how powerful ideology is in getting even ordinary people, who have little to nothing invested in it, to support the cause of governments and corporations.)


Let me begin with a very simple one-sentence argument, which I will expand on: The problem with secrets is that we cannot know and therefore make an informed judgement on them. Thus, people who are condemning Wikileaks for leaking out some 'inappropriate' information have the logic backwards, so to speak. You only know some things were inappropriate for release and are therefore condemning Wikileaks because they have been released.

Secrets, therefore, present a particularly tricky ethical problem because by definition they cannot be known, thus defying any attempt at rational analysis by which a sound ethical position can be arrived at. You cannot make an informed judgement on things that are secret, the knowledge of which is not available to you. Strange how this almost Mosaic principle in neo-classical economics is so often ignored in the neo-liberal world, for all its talk about free markets and the ubiquity of utilitarian decision making processes, which stress the ability to make informed judgements in order to maximise utility.

So you can rail against Wikileaks, but it doesn't seem to make much sense to be fundamentally opposed to its modus operandi as long as you are relying on the knowledge of the content of what it released. Also, asking Wikileaks to filter the information it gets before going public is to ask it to be yet another gatekeeper for information that only a select few can know, which seems to contradict its very raison d'être.

To reinforce this point and illustrate it in simple practical terms, let's take a look at the essential argument that the consequentialist stance entails:
Wikileaks leaked the diplomatic cables. Having seen them, I am capable of deciding for myself whether some cables should not have been made public. Therefore, I think Wikileaks was wrong to release some of them.
The second premise sits uncomfortably with an objection to the leaking of the information, which is after all being used to arrive at the conclusion. Thus, it would have to be removed in order to be consistent, which would necessitate a modification of the argument:
Wikileaks leaked the diplomatic cables. Therefore, Wikileaks is wrong.
Clearly, the argument becomes arbitrary. At best, it is inadequate—some premises and assumptions have to be filled in to make any sense of it. One way of doing so is to add "The authorities say that Wikileaks is wrong to do so" between the two sentences, thereby grounding one's ethical stance simply on what the authorities say.

Alternatively, one could acknowledge that basing one's opposition on a consequentialist argument (essentially, that leaking the cables is 'not a good thing to do') is unworkable, instead opposing Wikileaks' action on deontological grounds for 'not being the right thing to do' in principle. This position would then require a further argument regarding the ethical principles that Wikileaks have violated through the act of leaking the cables.

However, from I've seen so far, arguments to that effect seem to rely on treating public officials as private individuals who must be afforded privacy in their correspondence to each other through diplomatic channels. This argument is absurd because as long as public officials are using official channels to communicate to each other, they are performing roles on a public capacity. Therefore, the concept of privacy does not apply to them in such instances. Privacy applies to private individuals, and, as things stand, it may not even apply to the more public aspects of private individuals' lives, such as on the internet and at work. Confidentiality would be the more appropriate concept to use in this case, and it is governed by a different set of principles altogether.

Evidently, there is much work to be done disentangling some of the basic concepts and ideas involved in taking a stance on the Wikileaks issue. Being aware of the fundamental problem with secrets, I can nevertheless imagine that there are indeed certain situations where absolute transparency is not viable, especially where it directly endangers lives. However, in order to formulate rational beliefs about issues of public information, we first need to know what concepts to apply, where not to apply them and what principles may accordingly be invoked. This is what should be discussed out there in the public sphere, but I guess there won't be a slot on prime time programming as long as the public is preoccupied with blind furore over the leaks.

Having witnessed first hand the large student protest against the UK government's decision to raise tuition fee caps, I'm neither unnerved by the sporadic violence nor disheartened by the chaos of mass action. Rather, looking at the aftermath of the day, I've become more convinced of the corruption and the absurdity of the system.

Bourgeois sensitivity towards militant action is amusing. Repeatedly, we've been treated to condemnations of acts of violence and hooliganism by the established channels of the dominant bourgeois voice. The emphasis has been on the contrast between justified peaceful protest and bad violent protest. Perhaps if those sitting in their sofas watching the telly would reach a little into their memory and recall the last large-scale peaceful protest, they might remember the time when more than a million marched against Britain's participation in the Iraq War. The government went ahead with it anyway.

So what the official mouthpieces are really advocating is mass action that can be sidelined and ignored while the elite go on with their business. God forbid that a demonstration might make the latter anxious.

Violence is inherently problematic as it is simultaneously a powerful tool of the dominant ideology. Yet this does not diminish the idiocy of refusing to recognise the violence as a politically relevant part of this mass action. Statements about how a peaceful student movement has been hijacked by violent factions is begging the question: Where do these violent people come from and what do they want? Are they simply embodiments of the semi-mythical anarchic ruffian archetype? Or are some of them—God forbid—people who are genuinely frustrated by how they are treated by the politicians and their law enforcement minions?


While people are desperately protesting their disenfranchisement in ways that they think might have an impact, the official mouthpieces are busy trying to appeal to middle class disgust towards violence. They are also painting attacks on icons of traditional authority as appalling anti-social acts. Under this 'objective' and 'reasonable' surface discourse, ideology is plainly at work, and there is nothing too absurd for its efforts.

The attack on a royal car, in particular, has received much coverage worldwide. In Britain, some channels have been very active in expressing horror at the act. The time-honoured and sacred tradition of the monarchy itself seems to be under attack. Will those protesters stop at nothing in their quest to destroy the very fabric of society? Nevertheless, the public would be glad to know that the royalty proceeded bravely and resolutely to attend the royal variety show despite the attack.

A comedian on the show couldn't have done better.

I've been thinking: Maybe I can find no answers to the big ontological or ethical-political questions; maybe there is just too much that I don't know to give my own comprehensive and interesting account of how human society should be organised. Maybe I should strive, first of all, to answer one question—how to be?

A great many thinkers have devoted much time and effort to answering this question. Camus, one of those whom I remember most clearly, gives an absurdist answer when he asks and responds to his central question: If the universe is an absurd place, why live at all?

Yet, even though he deals exhaustively with the problem of existing with the awareness of the absurd, he seems to devote little attention to the material and therefore political-economic constitution of our everyday lives. That seems to be the domain of Marxist humanist philosophy, where the question has a different formulation: How does the individual assert himself as a human subject in a society that objectifies him and his labour through processes of reification and exchange? In other words, how does one be a human being who is capable of action unencumbered by the systems of domination immanent to our commercial society?

The answer seems to be revolution, one way or another—to destroy or destructively resist the systems of domination. Yet as we live our everyday lives, it seems to me that it is often not apparent what each of us as individuals can do in that regard. Between thriving through conformity and a difficult survival in opposition to everything that our society stands for, it's quite clear what most of us would choose.

So how might we chart the happiest path in our existence, neither completely consigning ourselves to having self-destructive tendencies to give up our subjectiveness nor sacrificing ourselves as martyrs on the barricades? How do we exist as human subjects in our normal everyday lives?

Nietzsche gives a pretty compelling answer: Be a strong subject. In essence, do not bow down to the rules imposed on you by others, but strive to create your own for yourself; assert yourself as a person with minimal regard to what others want to turn you into.

This sounds like a good general principle, but how do we go about applying it? What tangible thing can we build on it and hold on to?

Moving our attention away from the will to power, which can only reproduce systems of domination and thus lead to circularity, I believe that we must live for a labour of love. In other words, instead of instrumentalising ourselves to the conventions and modes of life prescribed by society in order to live, we have to subsume the necessity of conforming under our attempts to live to work on our own magna opera. Thus, in a Marxist way, we are re-inverting the order—instead of serving the rules, we are trying to make the rules serve us.

I think this is an interesting way of thinking because it implicitly makes a few crucial points—that we are only human in doing, and that we are only subjects in being able to do what we want (in a broad and existential sense of it). And I believe these points are crucial because they inform us on how to be.

Thus the journey begins.