In all the talk about Wikileaks and whether Julian Assange is a hero or a traitor, doing the human race a service or out to destroy the world order, I find myself thinking of Roland and Eddie from Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Or maybe Roland and Cuthbert. Both Eddie Dean and Cuthbert Allgood were characters who earned the epithet Ka-mai from Roland. The term meant “Fate’s fool,” at least roughly. In Roland’s view of reality (and King’s multiverse), Ka is a force that represents destiny, fate, karma, and blind chance all rolled into one. Ka makes seemingly random events serve a purpose, and seemingly coincidental events serve no purpose that humans can discern.
Most writing I’ve seen about Wikileaks seems to try to categorize Assange as an anarchist. To me, that’s not really accurate. Anarchists want all forms of government and authority to be destroyed. Assange seems to be targeting secrecy and deception, and to be operating only in the realm of information. His only weapon is information. His targets are misinformation and the withholding of information. He doesn’t use, nor encourage the use of, violence. Nevertheless many people seem to equate his actions with violence, alleging that the information he releases puts people in danger. That fascinates me. But it doesn’t answer the question of what Assange is.
That got me thinking. The world seems to me more and more to have its own self-preservation instinct, the longer I live in it. Call it the Gaia hypothesis if you will, but it tries to heal itself from all that we inflict on it – to the point that we become deceived into thinking we can continue to spill oil and belch carbon and get away with it.
The human world seems to have some of the same characteristics. Somehow, we avoided nuclear annihilation in the 1950’s and 1960’s, which only those of us of a certain age can really recall with clarity. Somehow, we were taken care of. If you are religious, you may well think that God saved the human race. If you believe in the innate goodness of people, you may think that we came to our senses and recoiled from that horrific possibility.
Now, we face newer threats. No one can kill the world in one giant fireball anymore – at least I don’t think so – but we risk death by a thousand cuts. We have little cells of terrorism and hate, which can spawn ugly and destructive consequences. And we have large-scale dysfunction and new sorts of plagues that we don’t realize are growing until they begin to show themselves. Instead of DDT and polio, we now have melamine in the milk, infecting the world’s food supply, and toxic assets infecting the world’s financial system. We have information plagues, as well: Unfounded allegations, rumor, libel, innuendo, lies, propaganda, and Internet hoaxes. These things threaten our sanity the way toxic assets threaten our economies, and melamine and lead threaten our food and household products.
So how does the Earth (or Fate, or Destiny, or God) attempt to remedy these plagues? In the case of the corrupted global information network (which includes everything from Fox News to Facebook) we get some medicine – remedies crafted by well-meaning and thoughtful people: FactCheck.org, Snopes.com, and some of the reputable news organizations doing real investigative work. But we also get the world’s equivalent of a high fever: Wikileaks. It’s a reflexive and unfocused attack on a plague by trying to make conditions inhospitable for the plague germs. Releasing all that information strikes me as the human race’s equivalent of the body releasing a host of white blood cells into the bloodstream. It may make the patient sicker, but it may cure the infection.
So maybe Ka is the organism behind all this. “Ka like a wind,” as King put it. Something is the universe abhors a vacuum – the absence of truth, honesty, openness and fairness among human beings. So Assange becomes Ka’s fool. He is the agent of the correction. And he’s not alone. He has plenty of people who believe in what he’s doing.
Adlerian psychology holds that neurotic symptoms often result from an individual’s lack of honesty with himself or herself – avoiding one’s social responsibilities by means of distracting symptoms and maneuvers, like the phobic person who avoids interacting with other people. The Adlerian therapist may employ a tactic that is colloquially referred to as “Spitting in the soup.” That means exposing the person’s hidden agendas and the real purposes of their behavior. It seems to me that Assange is doing that to the world of politics. And in one respect, I admire what he’s doing. The world of politics has too long been a parlor game played with people’s lives. Power, control, manipulation, deceit, and betrayal have been sad parts of human history for too long. It’s only after the fact that historians have been able to expose the deceits for what they were. We enjoy historical analyses because they peel back the façade of respectability and civilization, and expose the schoolyard behaviors and double-dealing that takes the honor and mystique out of epic battles.
It seems to me that the people behind Wikileaks are forcing that perspective that we usually only get from historical research, and thrusting it into the current dialogues of humankind. Thrusting it in our faces, in fact. And in a sense, it doesn’t matter whether Julian Assange comes across as a hero or a traitor (Traitor to whom, though?). He is an agent of a corrective force in human history. We’ve gotten too tangled up in our own brilliant ideas, and we all need to face reality. Yes, it’s possible that the release of information we thought would help us “get” the bad guys may have consequences for our strategies. If we fail to make adjustments, some people may be hurt or killed as a consequence. That should not happen. But if nations and people treated each other honestly, it would not happen. We as a nation are guilty of thinking we can be more clever than our opponents, and we have hurt and killed people in the process. We should be above that. Like law enforcement officers, we must behave in a civil and respectful manner at all times if we wish to earn the respect of others in the world. We have not been good at doing that. We’ve been acting like vigilante cowboys too often. We are now being held to account.
The next set of releases threatens to expose corporate double-dealing. That should be our next target. If we don’t take strong steps to root it out – steps that can’t be weakened and disabled through hysteria and fear-mongering from the powerful people who stand to lose from transparency – we will deserve the disruption that more leaks will cause.
If Julian Assange didn’t exist, I’m afraid that fate - or ka - would have had to invent him, or someone very much like him. He may be a lowlife grandiose narcissist who thinks he can force himself on women, but by instigating Wikileaks, he’s done something that would have ended up happening somehow anyway. Let’s hope that this fever leads to a recovery for the human race’s integrity.
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