The greater the power, the more need there is for transparency, because if the power is abused, the result can be so enormous. On the other hand, those people who do not have power, we mustn't reduce their power even more by making them yet more transparent.
Interpretation
Power should come with transparency to prevent abuse, but transparency shouldn't diminish those without power.
Julian Assange emphasizes the need for transparency as a safeguard against the potential abuse of power. He suggests that while those in power must be held accountable through transparency, we must also be cautious not to strip away the agency of those who lack power by demanding excessive scrutiny of their actions or privacy, which can lead to further oppression.
In practice
In a discussion about government surveillance, one might quote Assange to highlight the balance needed between transparency and personal privacy.
I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.
Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love.
You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you.
The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.
People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
Unless you come out of your mind and become a no-mind you will not know what life is all about, you will live in vain. You will not have your honeymoon, it is impossible. You will not know the sweetness that existence is full of and the ecstasy.
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.
It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.
I think that there are real concerns that we have around whose life is important and why. So if the official story is, for example, somebody was running from the police, does their life matter?
Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author's control.
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