Sleepy the Citizen
Sleepy, your post is an inspiration; A perfect example of the sorts of behavior a politically aware and functioning citizen
must exhibit in order to employ the most powerful instrument at their disposal for influencing their world, and the world of others: Their
Representative Govern.ment, an institution which, when healthy, delivers a quality of life we broadly think of as 'fair', not just a concept, is it provably and irrevocably woven into our deepest material fabric, our genes.
The original designers of this social mechanism naturally assumed that citizens living within it would act in accordance with what we now call 'rational self-interest', for indeed those who
did design it certainly crafted it to suit
their self-interests
.
But thanks to the political 'criminals' of the times who were vilified (e.g. the suffregettes) eventually most people won the right to have a voice in how things that intimately affected their day-to-day lives.
A powerful point here is that real, live people fought and suffered for the very rights we take for granted and often neglect to exercise.
After those first bold but faltering steps, Democracy has proven to be the worst form of government, but better than all the rest we've managed to come up with so far on this ole rock of ours , as we formed ever-larger and more complex groups as pre-human-ship to our current form as H.Sapiens. It has it's flaws and dangers (indeed Socrates was amongst the first to realise that it was vulnerable to what he called 'mob rule').
Incredibly, modern media (often employing very expensive marketing psychologists) and political support groups can convince astonishingly large numbers of people to vote
against their own self-interest, through clever psychological manipulation ,raising exactly the spectre that Socrates had warned about.
Is it any wonder that the political vacuum we created through collectively neglecting our necessary participation in the Democracy upon which it ultimatey depends, was filled by special interest groups who don't have the welfare of the citizenry in mind but rather a very narrow subset of it.
Sleepy has beautifully demonstrated the type of Democratic Spark which
must be present in a properly functioning Democracy. He's put the Representative back into Liberal Represtative Democracy ('Liberal' in this context means encompassing and fulfilling the needs and dreams of as many individuals as possible). In that context a healthy democracy has a constant dialogue with itself.
But so long as enough people are paying attention and putting in their 2cents worth, it unavoidably delivers a
compromise Society in which the great majority of it's citizens can live pretty satisfying and fulfilled lives, and periodically contribute to the continuing improving of the their own and others' lives with special consideration for (and participation in) that part of the process designed to continually improve the architecture of 'The System' and the collective will of the citizenship itself.
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MrSchulz, I really shouldn't have quoted you and I apologise. I should have just said that I was grateful that those particuar documents were brought out into the light. Your point about the definition of a journalist is well taken. If Investigaive journalism was alive and well, there would be less need for a site like wikileaks to exist at all.
So they're not journalists, but enablers, allowing the consience-ridden whistleblower a place to dump what they have (hopefully) judged be made public to be in the best intersets of the group as a whole. The material can then be analysed by journalists/writers, etc, for research,analysis and documenting.
Yes some the information was very sensitive and may have put lives at risk, and wikileaks is making big calls discriminating between public-need-to-know and Official Secrets, the keeping of which is rationally and sincerely to the benefit to the greater goup.
One things for sure Corporate bodies (military, commercial, governmental) may be a little wary from now on and perhaps clean up their collective act, with the spectre of being humiliatingly exposed globally just a mouseclick away. This may very well be a catalyst for reforms leading to the more transparent forms of Government, as sleepy describes.
Big Rep Again Sleepy!!! And sorry again to MrSchultz - I wasn't trying to attack you, and the quote was more than half just a little bit of fun.
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