The most Important Information We Seek Is What We Already Know

The traditional debate concerning secrecy and the State revolves around the question of what information should be available to the public and what information needs to remain hidden. This debate is particularly pertinent in light today in light of Wikileaks. Yet the philosopher Slavoj Zizek has drawn attention to the way that this debate can obsure the most powerful aspect of Wikileaks. Rather than the liberal claim that Wikileaks is important because of the way that it tells the public things it does not know he has pointed out that its true power lies in telling us things we already know, but refuse to acknowledge.

Of course Wikileaks tells us lots of things that most of us had no idea about (what certain diplomats thought of a particular leader etc.). However the information that has caused the most disruption has been of a different nature. It has related to such things as the employment of unlawful arrests, black hole prisons, torture, and the murder of innocents. All things that a large number of us already knew was happening. The difference was that, before Wikileaks (and similar sites of revelation), we were able to engage in plausible deniability. Not a plausible deniability that we could use when confronted with others, but a plausible deniability that we could use when confronted by ourselves. In other words, we were like many citizens of Nazi Germany who did not know what was happening to their Jewish neighbours. It was true that they did not have direct evidence, but there was a host of indirect signs that something very bad was happening. But as long as one is not confronted with the direct evidence one can refuse to know what one knows or, to put it in another way, refuse to acknowledge what we are aware of. Something that happens when we buy a diamond engagement ring or eat meat, or buy a cheap sweater. For most of the time we are dimly aware that the diamonds were likely extracted by people with no human rights, the animals were probably sorely mistreated and that there is a good chance the clothes came from sweatshops. What we do then is try to avoid a direct confrontation with the facts because, if they are presented to us, we are no longer able to pretend to ourselves that we do not know what we already know.

This same logic is what we see play out in our personal lives. Often the information that is truly devastating in a relationship, for instance, is not the information that you have no idea about, but rather the information you already know (through indirect signs) but have refused to acknowledge directly. Take the example of a married man who is having an affair and telling the other woman that he will leave his wife. Over time it might become obvious to the woman that this is not going to happen yet she continues to suppress the truth. Eventually however the anxiety produced by not being able to directly confront the reality becomes greater than the horror of being confronted by it. So she pushes the issue in some way so as to provoke the other to admit what they are not admitting to either themselves or the woman in question. Only then can real change happen (which might even lead to the man actually leaving his wife).

All this is a way of saying that often the debate between when something should be revealed and when it should be left concealed covers over the more interesting question of when the things we already know should remain concealed and when they should be revealed.