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 show how this basic truth about human
life  demonstrates the importance
of Wikileaks.

Biological adaptation
occurs through the reproduction of life forms, or their extinction.  Cultural evolution occurs through the
reproduction or extinction of ideas, leaving the life forms free to adapt
without extinction.  Only the most
rapidly reproducing  and adaptable life
forms, such as bacteria, annual weeds, and rats have proven able to truly
flourish in competition with social evolution.

Further, in the
modern world this adaptive information flow has increased far beyond anything
existing earlier, leading to greater material prosperity, vastly lower deaths
in childhood and in giving birth, more choice in how to live a life, and
awareness of those choices, greater toleration for those who are different from
us, and on balance much longer lives. In modern societies the poor became a
minority group for the first time since the rise of agriculture and imperialism
does not explain it.

But ideas can
freely spread and adapt into better ideas and so better guides to action only
to the degree they are unhindered. 
The spread of relatively free societies facilitated the ever faster
sharing and evaluation of ideas, has triggered modern science, production, the
arts, and much else.  Pre-modern
societies relied on far slower information networks that filtered out a great
deal before many had a chance to encounter it.  It is no surprise they have fared poorly in competition with
the modern world unless they are semi-monopolistic suppliers of crucial
resources they do not produce, like the Arab world.

Taking an example
from the book I have been writing, today
Islamic societies remain intellectual, scientific, and economic
backwaters.   Arab nations
collectively translate about 330 books annually, one fifth what small Greece
accomplishes.  With 5% of the
world’s population, they have .5% of the world’s internet users, lagging behind
all other developing countries. The Arab world’s production of scientific
papers is about 2 per cent per million inhabitants of that of an industrialized
country.   In 2007 Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates each
registered one patent, while Israel registered 25 and Switzerland 227.

The Arab world is backward because it is
difficult for people to acquire onformation and share it with others without
permission 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.  Big organizations benefiting from the
status quo have always and throughout history been the (not always intentional)
enemies of human flourishing.

Freer societies transformed the world
because far more than before, they enabled people to cooperate without needing
permission, and to gain access to information regardless of what others
thought.  But these gains cannot be
taken for granted, as sadly they are today.  In reality freer societies have to continually push back
against the large organizations that arise within them because big
organizations want to control information. 

Uncontrolled information in the hands of
others makes any organization’s survival less certain.  Therefore all big organizations without
exception incline to secrecy.  This
tendency is made stronger because within an organization a person’s power is
strongly correlated to their control over information.  If I know what you need to know, I have
power over you. A rare person will act differently, but they are even more
rarely in positions of dominance for just that reason.

Organizations and those in positions of
power within them want as much information about others as they can get, while
giving out as little information as possible. To the degree they succeed they
impede social adaptation and learning. 
They promote stagnation and rigidity.  This is undesirable for everyone else, but it gets worse.

Historically powerful organizations have
destroyed potential competitors – killed or imprisoned them – in order to
preserve their monopoly.  This is
true not only politically, but in the economy and in religion. 

The free institutions that made the gifts
of modernity available to most of us accomplished this by weakening anyone’s
ability to control information or impede cooperation they do not control.  But organizations within the modern
world still seek to control information and prevent competitors or alternatives
to relying on them.  This is
central to what an organization is, especially in government and business.

In undemocratic
countries these organizations have proven willing to kill millions to preserve
their power and domination.  In
“democratic” countries they do not possess a military and secret police able to
kill at wholesale levels, but they have proven to be just fine with people
dying to preserve their power and wealth. 
Consider the many thousands who died because big tobacco manipulated
information about tobacco’s health dangers to preserve their profits.  Or the “health” insurance companies who
take a person’s money until they need the insurance, and then seek to find a
way to deny them because of “pre-existing conditions.”  Consider the bureaucracies which
perpetuate pointless wars because admitting they were wrong would not be good
for leaders.

Our rapidly
coalescing corporate financial political and military elite marks a step
backwards for humanity because they are afraid of freedom, afraid of people
with independent access to information and afraid of changes they do not
control.  And so they seek to
control everyone through manipulating and controlling information.  Some critics claim the information
Wikileaks released was not all that important.  That’s partly true, and powerful evidence of what I am
talking about.  They want to
control ALL information.  If they
succeed they will ultimately do to our society what Arab leaders did to theirs.

Do governments and
corporations need secrecy?  Most of
the time my answer is NO.  We need
privacy in our lives because it is essential to intimacy.  But why do we need secrecy in an
organization?  To have power over someone who does not know what we
know.  When governments know what
citizens do not, that frees them from oversight.  Sometimes this is reasonable as with short-term military
plans in a war.  Usually it is
deleterious to popular control and oversight. These days it almost always is.
Because we do not have a free press despite it’s not being government owned.

A free media
publishes what it’s editors think is newsworthy.  Some are better than others, but the network of free media
means that oversight is always present. 
Today most media is corporate, and most are owned by corporations having
important financial  dealings with
government and products to market other than news.  Even if there were no conflicting financial interests on the
part of the corporation with telling the truth, if truth gets in the way of
profit a corporation will not fight for a principle.  Profit matters more, and a CEO who puts principle before
profit will become an ex-CEO.  With
few exceptions investigative journalism has died in the US because it is not
profitable.

At a national
level the free press no longer significantly exists in the US.  Ask yourselves WHY the best informed
people who watch television and the news get their news from the Comedy
Channel. (This was not the only research to indicate this fact.  There is more.)    Only the internet is free – and it
has a problem supporting independent investigators because it is hard to make
money one it.

Wikileaks fills a
huge void.  It releases information
provided by whistleblowers and so simplifies investigative journalism so that
it can exist again.  The people
making the leaks are not foreign agents. 
(If they were their governments would already know the information so
there would be no need to release it.) 
Often they do it because they are appalled at what they see around them
and have conscience enough to act on it. The people who benefit are the
citizens of the countries involved.

This is why
government and corporations conspired to close them down.  That a key institution by which
citizens can communicate with one another can be so easily compromised shows
how vulnerable our freedom is today. They have shown their true colors as
oligarchs, gangsters, and thugs. 
As Wikileaks exposes them over and over expect more of the same.

Will there be
mistakes by Wikileaks?  I suppose
so, but not on the scale of the Iraq War, which was cheered on by a venal and
dishonest corporate media.  Over
100,000 people who never did us harm are dead, our civil liberties compromised,
torture institutionalized, and America’s founding values tossed to the winds
because in large part of the media’s utter failure to do their job.  Nor did they learn from the experience.  The people most responsible for this
failure still have their jobs. 
Some have been promoted. 
And the critics who were proven right are still not given access to the
public.

Wikileaks is doing
what the media is supposed to have done. 
Combined with the investigative energy of people who use the net, it is
making the efforts of our corrupt elite to control us more difficult while
educating those Americans able to care about their country to their true
venality.

We are very
fortunate they exist, we owe them a lot and we may ultimately owe them for the
revival of real freedom and decency in America, should that come to pass. 

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.