Just for fun, let’s say you find yourself in possession of a vast cache of documentation showing the depths of evil being perpetrated in the world. People need to know about this, you think, for the good of humanity.
You realize that the truth is not pulling back the curtain to reveal the wizard is really a fumbling and incompetent but ultimately well-meaning old man. You learn that the truth is pulling back the curtain to reveal that Sauron or Voldemort has been in charge, and a darkness is settling over all the world.
Do you say to yourself, “People have to know this; I have to share this information”?
Careful before you answer: That’s what Julian Assange did, and he has not been a free man for more than a decade. The dark forces of the world have made it their mission to destroy him.
A long time ago the cartoonist and wise man Walt Kelly had his character say, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” What if we wake up and find that our rulers have indeed made us into the “Great Satan” our adversaries claim us to be? What if we find that we have lost our way? And, by “we” and “us,” of course, I mean the rulers of the land where we live.
What if the whole idea that we even need to have rulers is “the big lie”? What if we taught our kids how to self-regulate?
Individuals band together in small groups in order to achieve a certain purpose. These groups of neighbors — call them companies, churches, villages, towns — tend to grow larger and larger, and even though the idea was to work together, the group loses its neighborliness once it expands too far. The individual neighbor gets lost in the Mass.
The adversaries of freedom all seem to go by the adjective Big: Big Government, Big Corporations, Big Pharma, Big Tech. All of this Bigness started out with a small, simple, well-meaning intention, then lost its way.
I say we start over, go small, and watch out for signs we’re getting too big. And when we see those signs, avoid them like the plague. A Big plague.
We can start by letting Assange go free, go home, and – if he so chooses – go back to work.