..I find them liable to be subverted. In this case it is with a small excess of free time, scanning files into the computer for class and not really having to do anything else. Tomorrow the effort resumes--the mental capabilities required of the engineer could be rightfully terrifying to the laywoman--though I am by no means particularly skilled at my field, and not in comparison to men, either. A young friend of mine of Ashkenazi extraction quite exceeds me in intellectual capability for this field of applied science, and more credit to her. Art was doubtless my real calling, but the world proved brutal enough to make me focus on more practical things.
While my prior post on Julian Assange focused on the issue of the legitimacy of rape in patriarchal society (to put it very bluntly), accepted by all but acted out by those with power, there is another issue less connected to feminist matters which needs to be addressed, that of state secrets. I had already implied there was a real threat of damage from what the Wikileaks organisation had released by the comparison to the Ems Telegram, and this was no mistake. Power critiques of the world tend to suggest that power being held in any hands is inherently a bad thing, but of course, this ignores both human nature (and that is the nature of women as well as men) and the nature of social interactions in general. It would generally be considered an absurdity if it were a requirement of law that car companies explain in detail to their customers how the engine of their automobile works.
Diagrams of an idealised air cycle version of the Otto cycle could be provided with relative ease, but these can be barely understood by a woman with knowledge of a year and a half of the calculus and introductory differential equations. To attempt to explain the details to someone of lesser learning and capability would be to confuse them. How is this not the same in the political sphere? Leftists decry with horror the coming of the generation of Sarah Palin, but what is she other than the natural expression of an egalitarian society? What is other than the folksy representative of a people convinced by decades of propaganda that all individuals are created equal? For, in absolute terms, the intelligence of some is greater than the intelligence of others. Some women are born with crippling illnesses which disable them or make them sterile; they are still humans and still women, but they do not have the same capabilities as the mean of the female population. To accept them with compassion is a spiritual duty which stands in proud contrast to the application of Darwinian principles to human society, but to treat them as the equals of their sisters is to dishonour everyone involved with the charade.
A commoner is not a Queen, and a farmer is not a diplomat. People should strive to make the best of their abilities rather than be deluded into thinking that the whole of human achievement is open to them; not merely false, it is also viciously cruel to tell a mentally retarded child that he could become President someday, and yet this is veritably what happens in our system of egalitarianism.
In short, the application of specialized knowledge tends to require specialized people. When the average American cannot place Korea on a map (and why would they need to, so what dishonour is there in that?), why should they know of our secret discussions with the People's Republic of China on matters of the security and future of the Korean peninsula? The answer is that they should not, for attempts to apply the knowledge of their own lives to the situation will lead only to misunderstanding. Sarah Palin cannot even keep track of which of the Koreas is our ally, so what possible use would it be for her to know the details of the State Department cables that Assange leaked? There is none.
Asking average people to make day-to-day strategic policy decisions for states is exquisitely dangerous. The Athenians learned this with the immensely ill-fated Syracuse expedition, and the United States is starting to understand it as well as the opinion poll and folk revolts against establishment political parties brings the responsiveness of politicians to the demagogues of the modern era (Limbaugh, Beck, etc) to the same level as that of the Athenian people to the demagogues of their own era and State. The purpose of the Republican system was to allow the people to choose, through a careful product in which the men (and when the system was formulated it was very much only men) are winnowed down to a few candidates for each office, and the people are asked to select the one who will best represent their interests and serve the common welfare of their nation. In time, however, all the restrictions on their selection have slipped away from the republics, and with them came their decline. We must at least place good people before the voters, and this is no longer happening.
In the same way, Assange represents this populist edge: He is offering people the power to be involved in the secret, day-to-day operations of the state. He represents the internet-based ideology of Wikipedia: That Direct Democracy, "anyone can edit", will allow for the vast expansion of knowledge and the breakdown of traditional government. A sort of libertarian utopia of internet direct democracy will ensue. In doing so, however, he guarantees only that Alcibiades' ghost will find purchase in the American Republic as the man himself did in Athens.
The simple fact is that the average person engages in conservation of intelligence. They avoid seeking to impose upon their minds knowledge in excess of what they believe they need for a comfortable existence. They do not need to know secrets of governments, not because they could be harmed by them or because ignorance is bliss, but due to the bitter fact that if given this knowledge and the attendant power, they will interpret it through the lens of their own conserved intelligence, and accordingly come to simplistic dichotomies of the issue which will lead to the unstable decision-making which brought about the fall of the Athenian Thassalocracy. Mandating that they learn, however, is a distinctly evil state imposition. If they are successful with their present level of knowledge, and happy, they have no motivation to learn, and the lives of people should not forced to further conformity. Rather it should be simply accepted that the business of the common person in government is limited strictly to that involvement required to clearly communicate their basic needs and appeal that they be met.
Assange and his ilk are Utopians who bring a visiion of the world exactly like that of the Utopia of Marx, and potentially to be just as thoroughly drenched in blood. It will be based on the assumption that people inherently crave knowledge, which is inherently false--the desire to continuously learn must be inbred at a very young age--in the same way that the Goodness of humanity when freed of capitalism was the erroneous basis of Marxian doctrine and led to the horrors of Bolshevik Russia. Since people do not, in fact, desire to learn without their personalities being shaped by their parents in such a way, they will respond to this power in the worst possible way, and hand it through their own unconcerned ignorance to those who would do evil with it. This has been and will be the fate of all Utopias, and Assange and Wikileaks are the warning gun that a new Utopian ideology to replace the Marxian doctrines of the 20th century is now upon us, as the endlessly reoccurring ulcer of rationalist society.
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