Wikileaks: The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius?

OK, so I know its far-fetched, and I certainly don't believe in any sort of astrological predictions of the future - although I can lecture for hours on how every world religion derives from astrology - but the more this Wikileaks controversy develops, the more I entertain the idea that it will ultimately usher in a new age in the social evolution of humanity, even that Assange may be viewed as a messiah of sorts by future generations in a few hundred years.

Think I'm crazy? Well, let's examine the facts.

For one, Wikileaks is absolutely unstoppable. Remember how the government craked down on truly disgusting trends in internet publishing with a clear victimization such as child pornography and now no one can find that type of thing on the internet? Me neither. Remember how the US Congress passed that law against US banks doing business with online casinos and now no one in the US gambles online anymore? Me neither. Remember how two lengthy, troublesome, expensive lawsuits shut down Napster and Limewire and all the other peer-to-peer file exchange programs got terrified and followed suit in closing their doors? Me neither. Even the Chinese government has reportedly achieved very limited success in restricting the access of their populace to content on the internet they disapprove of despite a complete absence of accountability and arguably unlimited resources for the accomplishment of this task. Undoubtedly, as demonstrated by the case of child pornography, the inherent lawlessness of the internet has its costs, but what I'm pointing out is that it is a medium not even the most draconian government can effectively control or censor. The reasons are multiple; its conduciveness to anonymity, its capacity to adapt to restrictions and circumnavigate them far faster than the blunt and inefficient instrument of government can crank them out, and its global nature that essentially makes it impossible to outlaw the dissemination of anything as long as it is legal or, more accurately, not enforced against at least SOMEWHERE in the world. Censoring the internet is like ant-proofing a house - patches everywhere, the whole place reeks of poison, and they are still coming out of every hole. Perhaps, in a decade or two, the governments of the world will adapt and form some sort of consensus that allows them to police the medium with at least reasonable efficiency; but judging by Wikileaks own accounts of how little said governments agree on and how petty they are about their differences, this isn't happening any time soon. Meanwhile, Wikileaks is here today and it is not one person but a broad and difficult to detect network that merely gives easy access to information that has been toxic and sought after for centuries; the idea that one government or another will stop it is just the believers in government holding on to their fantasy of government being all-powerful when it is not.

Secondly, Wikileaks is not by any means a new idea. I couldn't stop laughing the other day when I saw someone post a comment on Wikileaks' own facebook page praising it for being a check against the "growing culture of secrecy" in government. I don't know if said person failed their world history class in high school or took it in the USSR, but in order for a culture of secrecy to be growing it has to not already be operating to its maximum capacity in the first place. Classified information may be a relatively new concept introdicued in the 19th and 20th centuries, but transparency has always been lethal to anyone holding any sort of power in line with the compliance and not coercion premise of FYG. The Vatican ruled Europe for centuries not by force, but by convincing an effectively large majority of people there that Christianity as they defined it was not only real, but that they represented it and hence should be bowed down to. The one event that is most commonly cited as bringing about the end of their tyranny isn't some territorial conflict or breakthrough scientific discovery, but the invention of a little contraption called the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. Slowly but surely, this allowed common people in Europe to read the Bible for themselves rather than trust some authority's interpretation and lose their faith in theocracy by virtue of realizing how much their authorities had lied to them, even if they still considered themselves devout Christians. To a lesser extent, the effects of late 19th century industrialization on availability of cheap reading materials and rising literacy rates among commoners can be credited with the loss of faith in the feudal-industrial complex in Europe in North America. It turned out that when women, minorities, workers and peasants, and so forth could READ the US Constitution, French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, and so forth; they became far more difficult for the corporate cartels to dupe into trusting the supposedly representative governments the latter had on a short leash. The people demanded rights and accountability, and while by the accounts of many they have not achieved them to their full potential, few would argue that the inequality situation is worse now than it was 130 years ago. Wikileaks has strong potential to become the next development in this series. Various forms of information distribution that expose the pettiness, corruption, and ulterior motives every government has always held but managed to keep secret on a grand scale have always had a considerable market of consumption, but the media available in previous decades have allowed for their successful censorship and marginalization, usually culminating in the masses accepting the leaked information as an exception rather than a rule. By using the uncontrollable and easily distributing nature of the internet for these same purposes, Wikileaks may well be the next crucial step in eliminating the naive faith that the masses have in government being benevolent and representative of their interests.

Finally, similar to what I said about the Tea Party but on a global scale, Wikileaks thrives on attention and bad press that attempts to marginalize it only empowers it. The internet may be impossible to censor, but as I would have learned with this blog if I didn't know already, it is also very difficult to attract attention to yourself on it due to the immense volumes of competition. If I could somehow piss off Sean Hannity or Rachael Maddow enough to provoke them to mention this blog's web address, even in the most negative light, on their television shows - I'd be a national celebrity and have 1000s of hits overnight. Wikileaks has already accomplished this. The various news agencies may call it "controversial" and give a voice to assinine politicians like Hillary Clinton and Peter King who in turn call it dangerous and terrorist with their mind-numbing hyperbole, but to quote the show Married With Children, "at least they call it". Every report on the dangerousness and controversy of Wikileaks sends more traffic its way, as does every lemming who still believes the Patriot Act was a necessary measure to protect the American people that bitches about Wikileaks endangering him in a local bar, church, or other public establishment. Sure, some people who discover Wikileaks agree with these negative views of it (and then go on to spread them in a similar fashion), but this also encourages others who are open-minded to discover it and the information being distributed by it, lessening the aggregate faith of humanity in modern government structures. This is conjectural, but I'm not convinced Julian Assange didn't purposely turn himself over to the British authorities over these controversial sex crime charges, and not even to raise the question in people's minds of him being pursued by governments for ulterior motives, but simply to get his face on TV. The idea that the man who is the face of an organization like Wikileaks and gets away with this couldn't evade regular law enforcement if he wanted is pretty far-fetched - he turned himself in after all; whereas his resulting celebrity status from turning himself in and the ensuing debates over his guilt or innocence have kept him and Wikileaks in the news for weeks. Previous leak releases resulted in feverish reporting and similar backlashes from politicians, but these died down relatively quickly. Like the Tea Party, the more opponents and detractors fear Wikileaks, the bigger it gets - and in the case of an organization whose objective is to distribute information, this is an assured path to victory.

In a sense, adjusted to the modern world, these qualities make Wikileaks and Assange somewhat comparable to the various messiah figures of the past and their ultimate impact on human civilization. Whether or not Jesus Christ or Siddhartha the Buddha existed as actual historical people, and whether or not one succumbs to the religious convictions associated with either, it is easy to make the case that the legacy of these figures eradicated faith in the widely accepted structures that preceded them and redefined how society as a whole perceived the world it lives in. In the case of Buddha, this culminated in the evolution to mainstream the previously extreme idea of abstension in Eastern practice, in sharp contrast to the indulgent hedonism inherent to various Asian Pagan faiths like Hinduism and Shintoism. In the case of Christ, a similar embrace of abstention came to replace the indulgence of Roman and Norse Paganism in Europe, with the introduction of additional elements of tolerance, non-judgment, and religion as an intra-personal relationship that does not require any sort of ritual - most accurately a return to the essentials of Judaic religion but in sharp contrast to the policies of its theocratic establishment in Jesus's time. The modern world may be the most secular it has ever been in human history, but the absence of religion is not interchangeable with the absence of faith. Fewer people may believe in god, or more accurately in a strictly dogmatic definition of god that involves ritual and practice, but most people continue to believe in something. Modern faith ranges from broadly defined and eclectic spirituality and moralism to kooky conspiracy theories of an impending New World Order to quite simply the benevolent and representative nature of government. We have come a long way from a society that strictly imposes a rigid set of faith-based norms on all its members to one in which faith differs significantly from one person to another, but we have as far if not farther a road ahead of us to a society in which even a significant majority learns to question everything surrounding them in a scientific fashion rather than falling victim to the plethora of logical fallacies that lead them to accept ideas on faith. If this isn't evident already, I am a quite unapologetic enemy of faith. My conclusion from observation and research is that no matter how benevolent and well-intentioned the nature of a faith-based belief, the ease with which it is usurped to motivate people toward enforcement of oppression against others and tolerance of oppression against themselves will always cause it to bring more harm than good. Wikileaks just may be a pioneer in the next step of social evolution by which a significant majority comes to this same realization, even if this is not what it intends to do; and the ensuing abandonment of faith as a whole may bring about a world very different from the one we are currently familiar with.