Just finished watching this movie staring Benedict Cumberbatch. His goal of absolute transparency initiated by those who feel a moral obligation to reveal something being kept secret allowing the greater public and history to decide the absolute morality of such secrets is lofty in the extreme, perhaps even a noble one.
However, all we need to do is look at the latest sensational infotainment headlines of the day to realize absolute transparency is irrelevant as a person's attention span can be counted in days on two hands. Even if WikiLeaks has achieved its goal in revolutionizing journalism for the public good (as it has taken such a first step) people in general will only care for a short period of time about any individual secret that has been revealed.
A post on social media broke down the terrifying headlines over the last twenty years, the most laughable of which was Y2K. The amount of insanity given to the event that promised to crash planes and send us all back into an economic stone age materialized in exorbitant salaries to programmers with the archaic knowledge of FORTRAN. The post ended with a question as to what we'll all die of in 2015.
The point I took from the post was two-fold: the public loves to feel urgency about some imminent threat and we forget almost as intensely.
How long before we forget there are people still dying of Ebola infections? How long before we return to judging minimum wage earners harshly for their laziness? How long before the Ukraine has always been a part of Russia and university campus rapes are again just boys sowing their wild oats?
It's not that people don't care, it's that there's too much to care about and hearth and home come first. So before the next person launches a protest about some grave injustice of the powers-that-be upon the righteous downtrodden, think about how long you plan to care about them. If it's just filling a weekend then just sit down and worry about your own behavior. Are you another Julian Assange pointing out the flaws in others just to deflect from revealing your own secrets?
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