WikiLeaks:

Radical Transparency or
Conscious Transparency?

Marcus T. Anthony (PhD)

Email: mindfutures at gmail dot com

You can also read this article on

www.22cplus.blogspot.com

Only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding can lead to these laws, the
daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the
heart.
Albert Einstein

In my recent post about Julian Assange’s idea of “radical transparency”, I stated that the
concept has some degree of power, but that it will not free us from many of the
hegemonies which restrict so much free thinking in modern society. I said that this was
because our essential problem is not merely about information access, but about the way
we are able to perceive reality itself. This mirrors Einstein’s oft-quoted statement that
problems cannot be effectively solved at the same level of consciousness at which they
are created. I believe that to really achieve radical transparency there is a requirement to
begin to transcend ego-based consciousness, and for the broader community to activate
Integrated Intelligence, or INI (http://22cplus.blogspot.com/2010/05/what-is-
integrated-intelligence_09.html) . My perception is that Julian Assange is still working
at the same level of consciousness that he is trying to overthrow, so his potential to
transform that level, that system is self-limited.

In this post I will explain in more detail what true radical transparency would look like,
if it included an advancement in consciousness as well as access to more information.
However, to distinguish what I mean clearly from Assange’s radical transparency, I shall
use the term conscious transparency.

Conscious transparency is where individuals are attuned to the genuine

thoughts and agendas within themselves, and are able to readily perceive
such thoughts and agendas within others. It necessitates a well developed
Integrated Intelligence. INI can help us be more honest about who we are and where our
motivations come from; and it can help us intuitively sense others’ intentions, and the
deeper workings of their psyches. The latter includes information that they may not be
conscious of themselves.

Conscious transparency opens the mind to receive information which is truly liberating.
I believe that it is far more liberating than knowing what The United States’ attaché in
Beijing thinks of Chinese President Hu Jintau, which is the kind of information typically
leaked by WikiLeaks.

The Integrated Society

In the rest of this post, I will draw on some of the arguments outlined in my book
Integrated Intelligence, and in particular the final chapter “Integrated Intelligence in
the Knowledge Economy and Beyond.”

What I am going to do here is what futurists call “visioning”. There’s a particular vision of
the future which I have developed called “The Integrated Society”. The Integrated Society
is an essentially utopian model of a future society where education systems, business,
and culture freely permit the employment of Integrated Intelligence. The greater
population are thus able to access Integrated Intelligence in their daily lives, work and
study. That is, in The Integrated Society, intuition forms an integral part of the lives of
the people.

Needless to say conscious transparency is central to this vision. I like to clearly state that
The Integrated Society is utopian, because it is not meant to be practically applied in toto
to any society in the present age (though it can be applied to smaller groups, and possibly
very small communities). A utopian vision is meant to ferment discussion, and to bring
about change incrementally where it is deemed possible and appropriate. It is not meant
to be seen as a perfect cure-all to society’s ills, a model that must be forced upon the
people whether they like it or not. We all know the terrible cost of such attempts to
enforce utopian visions in the past. In China in the late 1950’s, Mao’s Great Leap Forward
cost up to 50 million lives alone, as the country collapsed under the weight of a self-
generated mass delusion.

Power and Information in the Knowledge Economy

The knowledge economy - which has superseded the industrial economy - has
perpetuated many of the latter’s themes: scientism, instrumentalism, secularism,
empiricism, and technological determinism. The spiritual components of life, education
and society have become increasingly neglected.
Education in the age of globalisation is increasingly about serving the materialistic
needs of a technocratic society. This has extended into universities, where even ‘pure’
sciences such as botany and entomology have become driven by “commercial interest
and consumer demand”. Instrumental rationality and technoscience have come to
dominate society, science, and education.

In The Universal Schoolhouse educator James Moffett argues that corporate greed and
political shortsightedness have hijacked education. Personal and spiritual development
have been downplayed by governments in the creation of modern curricula, in favour of
training for productive employment and social responsibility. Policy makers and
business leaders are afraid that the former will subvert the latter two, argues Moffett.
Big business has been largely concerned with short-term profits, and since personal
development and spiritual wisdom are not seen to build short-term profits, they have
become increasingly neglected.

Education in the age of globalisation has become increasingly about serving the
materialistic needs of the technocratic society. This has come at the expense of any
greater goal related to the meaning or purpose of life. According to an extreme
interpretation, children and graduates are products of an education system that turns
them into money-focused consumers with reduced capacity to intuit greater meaning or
purpose from life or its significant events. Modern life tends to valorise the individual
above others and the greater whole. This has, with the aid of industrialisation and neo-
liberalism, tended to encourage greed and narcissism.

In greater society there is a similar problem. Deeper needs that lie beyond industry and
corporate goals – the social, Gaian, collective human, and cosmic evolutionary – have
become disowned. David Loye (www.davidloye.com) has argued that the neo-liberal
vision, emerging from the philosophy of neo-Darwinism and Adam Smith, produces a
collective of selfish individuals,

In the first diagram, below, you can see a depiction of the way both spiritual and
mundane information are restricted in the knowledge economy. The arrows represent
the forces of power and manipulation within the knowledge economy. The inward-
pointing arrows indicate the controlling forces of industry, governments and “the world
ego”, as it attempts to push away the intuitive input of Spirit. This push occurs because
much spiritual information does not serve the needs of the ego, not to mention ego-
centred government, industry, society, and media. The outward pointing arrows
represent the forces of Spirit or the cosmic evolutionary imperative, which tends to
transcend the agendas of the ego.
The first diagram shows that in the knowledge economy, the system boundary tends to
sit at the level of industry, with both government and society lying below industry, as
servants of the industrial machine. Similarly, in the global economy the interests of
nations are heavily influenced or controlled by industry and business, which fall within
the boundary of the system. Even in modern China, which is increasingly driving the
global economy, government is intimately connected with business. This occurs at all
levels, from local government, to the Beijing authorities. When Chinese president Hu
Jintau visited Shenzhen, near Hong Kong recently, one of the first things he did was
arrange a public hand-shaking photo opportunity with Hong Kong’s richest man,
property tycoon Li Ka Shing.

The outer arrows in the first diagram indicate the ‘intelligence’ of the ‘Kosmos’ and Gaia,
consistent with the theory of Integrated Intelligence, where the Kosmos has an innate
intelligence. The information cannot move into the inner levels of the system, as
business (represented by the inner arrows) prioritises values and information which are
not inclusive of the intelligence of the Kosmos. The inner levels of the system serve as
repelling forces to the trans-rational (spiritual) information of Kosmos. There is no
chance for either Julian Assange’s radical transparency, nor my idea of conscious
transparency.

The gradation of colour from dark at the centre to lighter hues at the periphery suggests
the increased access to information at each level. The “self/ego” is darkest, because the
‘self’ in this model is most ‘in the dark’, with information access restricted by the levels
above it. Kosmos is depicted in transparent colour as it retains transparent information
– but its data is hidden from the individual by the covert regulating mechanisms of the
levels in between.

Potential uses of Integrated Intelligence within this problematique

The key question is asking how conscious transparency can assist us in transcending this
broad problem. We can also compare this with the way that Julian Assange’s radical
transparency might also help. Remember, the former deals with intuitive and spiritual
information, the latter with information contained in computers and other written or
spoken forms.

For the citizen of the modern world, personal choices are greatly influenced by the
imperatives of globalisation and industry, as well as governments and the policies which
they implement. For a more expansive and holistic education and society, where
Integrated Intelligence might be valued and employed, the education system needs to
expand definitions of what it means to be human and lead a meaningful life. What is
required is a movement beyond education as mere training, acquisition of knowledge,
and credentialism. Integrated Intelligence and its core operation of integrated
perception (http://22cplus.blogspot.com/2010/05/what-is-integrated
intelligence_09.html) – the direct experience of the interrelatedness of people,
environment and the universe – can help develop a “commitment to the whole”.
Wisdom – an end state of Integrated Intelligence – also entails a commitment to
something greater than the self.

Numerous questions regarding meaning and purpose were erased by the Western
rationalist hegemony – especially in the nineteenth century. As Carl Jung realised, in
such circumstances, people turn to entertainment and hedonism for relief, and may
suffer neurosis and psychosis. Integrated Intelligence and a spiritual and meaningful
school curriculum could potentially be a part of the revival of a more integrated,
spiritual and humane education system.

Transpersonal philosopher Jose Ferrer has indicated the importance for transpersonal
philosophies to be grounded in practical life. His “participatory knowing” is compatible
with the transpersonal vision and participatory epistemology of the eighteenth and
nineteenth century Romantics, and with conscious transparency. The key point is that
Integrated Intelligence may be part of a greater participation by the individual in a
society which is able to freely access Integrated Intelligence.

The Integrated Society and its education system

Now, let’s shift our focus to the way information might operate in The Integrated
Society, where conscious transparency is prevalent. The second diagram, below, depicts
the shift in power relations in that society. There is a shift in the flow of information and
power that is entailed when Integrated Intelligence is fully implemented into education,
work and culture. Unlike the system shown in the first diagram, the individual is in
continual feedback with the intelligence of the Kosmos and all the levels within the
system. This would require the greater development of ‘receptivity’ – the relaxed
openness to intuitive information, in a state of presence. Each level contains its own
drives and imperatives, but ultimately serves the highest order. The arrows show that
information and ‘force’ are moving both ways – from Kosmos to individual, and from
individual to Kosmos.
To use Rianne Eisler’s terminology, the system in the second diagram is an actualisation
hierarchy – not a dominator hierarchy, as in the first diagram. The individual is not
forcibly controlled by the hegemonic forces within the system. The outer levels represent
‘attractive’ potential higher levels of consciousness evolution, not the hand of a
dominating master.

In the Integrated Society, the individual is consciously centered within fields of

consciousness, with the potential of developing more expansive domains of awareness;
conscious transparency.

In the second diagram, industry is in dialogue with all those forces above and below it.
Consistent with Rianne Eisler’s participator model, the Kosmos is participating with the
entire system, not dominating it. Society and nation are situated at the second level of
the system, as the integrated society as a whole (employing the intelligence and wisdom
gleaned from Kosmos via integrated perception) determines what government and
business will do, not the reverse. The use of lighter hues (as opposed to the darker
colours in the first diagram) is intended to suggest an integration of intelligence, a fluidity
and transparency between the levels, and a free flow of information.

With Assange’s radical transparency, the diagram would be similar in some ways.
Radical transparency undermines the power of regulating government and industry.
However the outer guiding input of Kosmos/Spirit would be absent, because, as far as I
am aware, Assange and the WikiLeaks community do not recognise its existence. This
leaves the entire systems as a reconfiguration of the knowledge economy, operating at
the same level of awareness. This inevitably leaves the system open to further
‘colonisation’ by the hegemonies of ego-centred individuals and groups, because the ego
tends to think and act according to self-interest.

Of course, even in the Integrated Society, the potentiality for spiritual evolution might be
compromised by the constrictive forces of ego, and the reactionary forces within each
level, including industry. Levels of consciousness are like the self-regulating tendencies
of attractor fields in systems theory. These fields are extremely powerful, and tend to
restrict the movement of an individual’s consciousness from one field to a higher one.
There is always the chance that individuals, or even the entire system, can get “sucked”
back down into a lower ego-based system.

Therefore Integrated Intelligence – with its integrated perception and wisdom – and
conscious transparency, may assist in the circumvention of the corporate power
structures and governments that dominate the present knowledge economy and the
globalised world. Integrated Intelligence has a spiritual value structure and helps foster
a mystical/spiritual worldview, which may in turn helps override the materialist
imperatives of modern culture.

Conversely, Julian Assange’s concept of radical transparency, in itself, is unlikely to have

such an effect.

Conscious transparency has the further obvious advantage over radical transparency in
that it does not require the mediation of computer hackers and internet giants like
Google and Yahoo to drip-feed us the information which might potentially liberate us.

Marcus

Books by Marcus T Anthony: see following page

* * *
 Books by Marcus T. Anthony
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Marcus T. Anthony’s blog about the future:

www.22cplus.blogspot.com