| Lies we tell ourselves.
This one (that the court is not part of the
government) goes
right along with the lie that corporate campaign
contributions
are not bribes. The sad part is that even though all branches
of
our government have been throughly corrupted, the people who are
neck deep in
the corruption are blind to it. This is why
institutionalized secret
courts are so dangerous. It's not
because the people running them are bad
human beings; it's
because all human beings are prone to self-deception. We
all
play the hero in the stories we tell ourselves. When we do
things in secret
it lets our self-told stories dominate our
reality. By bringing the light of
day to these secret
proceedings, Snowden has offered these judges the gift
of
self-reflection.
The judges' protests about how their secret court is
perceived
highlights the extreme danger these courts pose to the public.
The
problem is not that the public perception is skewed, the
problem is the court's
self-perception is skewed by the
secrecy. Here's an example from the
article:
"The court is a neutral party, not a collaborator or
arm of the
government," said one government official close to the
court.
Such obvious self-contradicting insanity is not
limited to
anonymous government sources. The director of the NSA told
the people
of the United States of America that he has no
knowledge of or interest in
WikiLeaks. No sane person would
try to foist such an obvious lie, cloaked as an
admission
of total incompetence, on the public they are supposed to
be answering
to.
Institutionalized secret courts inevitably leads to this kind
of
self-serving self-deception. This is why the
Constitution of the United
States of America guarantees us the
right to a "speedy and public
trial". Courts that
are secret will always diverge from the common public
consensus
reality. This is also why these issues are so contentious.
Realities
are in conflict.
Many of the greatest human institutions: democracy, our
legal
system, the methods of science including peer review and open
publication;
are tools to help protect ourselves from distorted
realities caused by
self-deception. If institutionalized secret
courts actually worked without
spiralling down into a separate
reality fueled by self-deception then we
wouldn't need these
other great institutions. There would be no need for peer
review
in science or for free and fair elections in government.
Just like
secrecy and self-deception fuel corruption in
government, they fuel dysfunction
in families. The first rule
of every dysfunctional family is to keep it secret.
What happens
in the family stays in the family. Secrets and dysfunction are
two
sides of the same coin. Dysfunctional relationships cannot
thrive in the light
of day. They must be kept secret to survive.
Likewise, keeping things dark and
secret breeds dysfunction and
what is called dysfunction in family situations is
called
corruption in governments.
This is why the US government is so
intent on punishing Snowden
and all whistle blowers. From the government's
perspective, they
have violated the primary rule of dysfunctional families:
keep
the dysfunction (corruption) inside the family. In the eyes of
the
president, in the eyes of these secret courts, even in the
eyes of most members
of Congress; Snowden is guilty of aiding
and abetting the enemy because the
government perceives the
people of the United States of America as the
enemy.
Of course that doesn't make sense. That's why they feel the
need
to keep so much of what they do secret. By keeping it secret,
the obvious
contradictions in their reality need not be faced or
corrected. I imagine the
release of these secrets is actually
physically painful to them because it
forces them to re-evaluate
their reality. As Don Marquis
said:
If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love
you;
But if you really make them think, they'll hate you.
The biggest revelations by far that have resulted from the
NSA
leaks have not been about the massive data collection by the NSA.
The
biggest revelations have been that all these emperors in the
corrupt corporate
government and the corrupt corporate media have
no clothes. Their relentless
pursuit to persecute the leaker and
to smear him and everyone else associated
with bringing their
secrets to the light of day shows off their true colors
and
exposes their self-delusion and warped reality to the rest of
humanity.
---
Our job is to remind ourselves that there are more
contexts
than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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