The Right to Know

The public has the right to know the truth about influential individuals, groups and organisations.

That right is associated with the assessment of social influence and how it is used and abused, especially politically.

The public also has a right to know the causes of social influence, particularly when those causes are associated with unjustified access to excessively influential media outlets.

Not everything in the public interests involves reports about corruption and organised crime.

Although organised crime can only flourish when public administration and government practices are associated with corruption and/or incompetence, the public has a right to know about organisations devoted to overcoming corruption and addressing incompetence.

How do you attempt to prevent vulnerable persons from making terrible mistakes?

How do you attempt to encourage powerful persons to act appropriately?

Of course, people acting against the public interest are likely to find investigations into their corrupt conduct to be unpleasant. 

Yet corruption prevents proper policies from being implemented.

It prevents public interest journalism from being properly funded.

It prevents power from being used appropriately.

It prevents a quality media from thriving.

It prevents the implementation and expression of a quality constitution in every society.

It therefore prevents the appropriate expression of democracy.

To practice public interest journalism is to express political and civil freedom through the prevention of hubris and hypocrisy.

It begins with the encouragement of local appropriateness. 

It reasonably and reflectively questions assumptions about what is appropriate and what is not.

It supports the ongoing improvement of health and health services.

It helps to encourage and maintain justice.

It provides a vital service towards preventing corruption.

What, then, is quality news, and for whom, and who supplies it, and why?

When politicians behave as though democracy is a farce, they are corrupt.

They encourage the gullibility of the ill-informed public through the widespread use of propaganda and the abuse of power.  

Some of the propaganda may even be disguised as news.

In every society, there are corrupt practitioners of law, accountancy, politics, policing and public administration.  Corrupt individuals frequently allow criminals to be regarded as business persons.

The political slogan of 'jobs and growth' hides much corruption, like any thought-terminating cliché.

When the people attempting to prevent corruption are treated as though they are criminals, then the criminals in charge of governments act with impunity and destroy the public interest.

In a corrupt society, sensible individuals often consider it necessary to report important facts through satire or entertainment rather than through journalism.  

That is particularly the case when arrogant or fearful journalists refuse to report important facts.

In many cases, journalists are prevented by their editors from investigating the truth, possibly as a consequence of legal threats and/or financial threats.

How then, can creative approaches to editing help overcome such obstacles?

What is high quality news and how is it produced, and for what purpose(s)?

How carefully have you been investing in anti-establishmentarian necessities?

How do you think about proper productivity in relation to dependency ratios, unemployment, crime, ignorance, laziness, disability, necessity and corruption? 

The right to know is associated with investing in good faith, with appropriate respect for privacy. 

What has history taught you about the right to know?

Are you aware that corrupt political systems are either advance-fee scams or infested with bribery, or both?

If you think you have been investing in curiosity appropriately, and how do you know one way or the other?  

What is your approach to searching for lost or hidden money and lost or hidden democracies?

Have you ever been duped into sending money as part of an advance-fee scam?

In purported democracies, the political advance-fee scam is often confused with the vote-for-me scam, especially when the former is mainly a crony capitalism scam and the latter is mainly a vote buying scam.

What have you been learning about scams in recent years, and why? 

What do you know about subtle and not-so-subtle forms of extortion?

Have your ever received an extraordinarily large and unexpected inheritance from a deceased member of a royal family from a foreign country you have never visited?

 

Have you ever been persuaded to purchase something expensively beyond your means with the false promise of gaining considerable additional wealth as a consequence?

Have you ever had your personal identity stolen?

Have you ever had anything else stolen, such as your hope, or your peace of mind?

There have obviously been many short-lived subcultures and cults in the non-digital world.  There have been very few, if any, long-term ones, except for those regarded as hegemonic and established in terms of pseudo-mainstream religions, corrupt political parties and greedy corporate boards.  

Most subcultures have been youth subcultures, which the practitioners quickly outgrow with their changing hairstyles.

How do you distinguish between corrupt practices and merely unusual ones?

Excuses for corruption are never based on sufficient evidence of the public interest.

Reasons to rebel creatively against unjust conformity are another matter entirely.

There is nothing beneficial to the public about corrupt practices, even if corrupt individuals attempt to argue otherwise.  Quality journalists have little tolerance for such arguments.  

And quality journalists never scapegoat members of subcultures or other minority groups.

How do you tell the difference between investing money, squandering money and stealing money?

How does your philanthropy address corruption and scapegoating and other unpleasant practices?

How are you helping quality journalists to address unjust practices, especially if you happen to be a journalist yourself?

In many parts of the world where legal and financial structures tend to favour the corrupt rather than the innocent, it is necessary for public interest journalists to address issues somewhat obliquely, for reasons of personal and interpersonal safety.

Addressing corruption is never easy and rarely safe, even when conducted mainly through twitter and satire.

The public has a right to know what is safe and what is honest, and what is dangerous and dishonest.

How have you been investing in social research to help prevent corrupt practices from taking hold in various places, organisations and circumstances?

When thinking about your investments in simple living and good relationships, do you give much thought towards the essential services you may need in the future?

Perhaps someone holds a grudge against you.

Perhaps someone is seeking revenge against you.

Perhaps you have acquired powerful enemies.

Perhaps you have already been treated cruelly by at least one person.

Perhaps you require a low profile approach to investigations, and to reporting.

No-one of any influence with the ordinary public really wants to stop corruption.

The poor still suffer as a consequence of corruption.

The old and ill are still ignored as a consequence of corruption.

Celebrities still attract attention to themselves.

People less physically and/or financially attractive know that no-one of extraordinary influence genuinely cares about truth or expresses a willingness to respond to it appropriately.

Yet investing in awareness is necessary.  It relates to the right to know.

What do you know about the straw man arguments used by members of a corrupt Establishment and their political and media puppets to maintain unjust power structures and unfair systems?

Truly good people do not co-operate with corrupt cultures, corrupt systems or corrupt individuals.  They refuse to be part of the structures perpetuating corruption.

How though is corruption to end?

Everyone has a right to receive at least one adequate answer to that question.

Corrupt systems do not address injustice.  Nor do they appropriately respond to wrongdoing.  They punish the despairing.

Are you actively and diligently well-informed and kind?

Have you ever experienced an apprenticeship in the kindness industry?

Do you already know how to identify key issues when seeking to invest in the kindness industry?

For most people, there is no hope in the world, there is only distraction from despair.  No amount of kindness can compensate for ongoing corruption and cruelty.

Reasonable despair arises from encounters with systemic injustice.

How, then, are you investing in structure appropriately, and where is your proof? 

In some parts of the world, dilapidated exteriors hide palatial interiors.

In other parts of the world, majestic exteriors hide dilapidated interiors.

And regardless of the quality of interiors and exteriors, much blatant and half-hidden corruption happens nevertheless.

There is no point in investing anywhere with corrupt governments, inadequately accurate journalistic standards and suchlike problems.  

Are you sure you have a well-informed approach to journalistic patronage?

Are you sure you understand and practice necessary ethics?

Are you sure you are regularly investing in purposeful reviews?

Deliberately bringing suffering and death into the world is obviously cruel.

Voting for corrupt governments is obviously cruel.

How do you know your plans are not associated with cruelty?

How do you know your investments are improving the world? 

What does improving the world mean to you in practice, and why?  

How do you intend to improve the world in the months ahead?

What have you discovered about quality political satire as philanthropy?

All corrupt hierarchies are problematic.  They are associated with aggression.  

Yet aggressive competitiveness is much more of a problem than hierarchical structures themselves, at least when a social hierarchy adequately expresses the enlightened benevolence of well-informed kindness.

In every society, the main beneficiaries of the political-industrial-military-financial-judicial-bureaucratic complex do not care about harmfulness.  That is why they are not interested in supporting necessary reforms.  Indeed, they will oppose reforms aggressively.

Corrupt individuals have deluded themselves into believing that the selfish propaganda of the market economy provides the world with goodness, kindness, peacefulness, reliability, fairness and responsibility.  Yet that market, and the marketing associated with it, only provides cruel competitiveness, pollution, greed and poverty. 

To the corrupt, any expressions of enlightened benevolence may be regarded as indicative of unreasonableness.

Whether an ideology is on the right or left of the political spectrum, it does not reflect history, or science, or reasonableness.

Ideologies tend either to serve the political-industrial-military-financial-judicial-bureaucratic complex or they encourage a power vacuum to arise.

And power vacuums merely replace an established aggressive system with aggressive chaos.

Political power itself often causes the hypocrisy and hubris from which most cruelty arises.

What have you been contributing towards enlightened benevolence through appropriately humane principles, policies and practices? 

If you agree that corruption is a desperately urgent problem to address, do you know with absolute certainty that you communicate that opinion appropriately?  

Corruption is the opposite of benevolence.

One of the most dangerous aspects of a corrupt Establishment is its grip on the most bigoted yet politically influential parts of the mass media.  That is mostly due to the fact that bigoted persons in the Establishment control that media.

All truly reasonable people know there is something seriously wrong with all societal systems, including education systems and health systems and electoral systems.

But can the systems be improved unless political practices are improved?

And how can political practices be improved when a corrupt media is a considerable part of the problem?

A decent society would always provide appropriate support for people who have suffered and/or continue to suffer from the cruelty of the indifferent and the arrogance of the ignorantly privileged.

But there are no decent societies.  There have never been decent societies.

Organisations are inevitably as corrupt as the people at the top of their hierarchies when egocentric assumptions and egotistical wishes form the expressed basis of their policies, plans and practices.

As history shows, the beneficiaries of corrupt systems are always willing to dupe the ignorant into being violent on their behalf.

That is why despair is so prevalent, as is delusion.

Competent managers prevent emergencies from arising.  They primarily do so by preventing corruption, cruelty and incompetence.

 

Corrupt practices, otherwise cruel ones, and many forms of incompetence are associated with the development of emergencies and other forms of suffering. 

 

How do you identify competent and incompetent expressions of management, and what do you do as a consequence?

So many stupid, ignorant and insensitive people in positions of influence are unwilling to think about anyone but themselves and their own social and cultural identity, and their own social and cultural preferences.

They never identify themselves as corrupt or otherwise abusive.

They never acknowledge their preferences as cruel, wasteful or otherwise disrespectful.

They have misguided views about pleasure, leisure and luxury.

They assess other people's needs without consulting those people appropriately.

They disregard needs they do not personally experience.

You may be aware that corrupt cultures attract the gullible with false promises.  The gullible often make decisions on impulse.  They do not reflect appropriately on the possible presence of illusions and delusions in their minds.  They mistakenly believe that perceived friendliness equates with benevolence.

Perhaps you have been gullible on many occasions in the past.  You may be worried you will be gullible on many occasions in the future.

 

All genuine political philanthropy aims to prevent gullibility.

 

The gullible must be encouraged to improve their own thinking and assessment processes, with or without the assistance of political philanthropy.

How do you define gullibility?

Whether in workplaces, family situations, neighbourhoods, political practices, and on social media and in the mass media, influential people fail to acknowledge the truth about corruption. 

That is probably why they do not act to prevent corrupt practices.  That is also probably why they ignore risks, disregard the beginnings of emergencies, and why they prefer to pursue hedonistic self-indulgence instead.

Many people are easily duped into believing they are provided with a better essential service when paying for it through the acquisition of personal debts.

They fail to notice when governments fail to provide essential services in the public interest.

They fail to notice the narcissistic stupidity in their own thinking.

They do not realise that they should be providing themselves with better governments if they want better essential services they do not have the resources to fund in other ways.

Nor do they realise that far too many people have unmet needs as a consequence of narcissistic government practices.

Excessive complexity in organisational systems hides corruption and causes cruelty.  It may be caused by narcissism and/or bullying.

Perhaps you have directly and/or indirectly encouraged cruel administrative practices.

Are you sure you are adequately able to distinguish between the kind and the cruel?

It is impossible to be both cruel and kind.  Cruelty always negates kindness.

The true intelligence of adequately good reasoning is meant to help provide the best policy options for solving the world's most pressing, and depressing, problems.

When those policy options are ignored by persons in positions in power, that is an indication of ingrained corruption.

But how can corruption be overcome if not with adequate intelligence, well-informed kindness and the freedom to choose whether or not to keep a corrupt system in place?

What do you know about political corruption masquerading as political legitimacy, and how did you acquire that knowledge?  

What do you know about cruelty masquerading as love, and how did you acquire that knowledge?

How do you compare thoughtful reciprocity with corrupt practices?

Cruel regimes have often treated campaigners for political reform as though they are mentally ill, and even as if they are criminals. 

Corrupt systems can only support corruption.  That is why corrupt systems must be replaced peacefully.  They cannot merely be changed incrementally so that some cruelty and some hypocrisy can still continue.

But is that likely to be a revolutionary process or a relatively reasonable one?

Preventing bullying is necessary if corruption and greed are to be stopped.

Unfortunately, most people delude themselves about the world, even if they are not bullies themselves.  When they have access to the facts, they ignore them. 

When people are uninterested in the truth, they are unlikely to contribute to any sort of enlightened benevolence.

Although corruption may sometimes arise haphazardly, even by accident, the problems it causes could easily be remedied if non-corrupt persons in positions of power acted quickly enough.  Yet they rarely do. 

Why is there so little effectiveness in addressing corruption, incompetence and other forms of harm?

As usual, there are far too many corrupt individuals and groups in positions of power.  They are motivated to hold onto their grandiose delusions and kleptocratic greed, even if it means committing crimes and legally-sanctioned atrocities to do so.

The greedy take the money.

The suffering continues.

Fair, simple and effective systems are necessary.

From the point of view of reasonable people, such systems would be non-corrupt and competently managed.

Narcissists tend to consume narcissistic media and vote for corrupt governments.  Any seemingly caring acts such people attempt to express are for self-aggrandising reasons.  Any societal benefit from those acts is far outweighed by negative consequences, and negative causes.

How are you preventing narcissistic cliques from ruining the innocent lives?

How are you preventing narcissistic cliques from ruining the world?

How do you know when mutually beneficial pleasantness is actually an expression of corruption, and what do you do when that arises?

What have been your experiences of gifts, donations and bribes?

Most reformers merely wish to amend parts of corrupt systems rather than address the fact that systems cannot really serve the public interest unless the structures underpinning them are improved. 

If you are corrupt, you may regard the good, the kind, the peaceful, the reliable, the fair and the responsible to be ideals rather than reflections of reality.

Acts of aggression are never reasonable.  And politics is often associated with the aggression of selfish people, not the improvement of societies. 

Perhaps you consider the development of your talents to be your duty.

Yet the inappropriate nurturing of talents, and the inappropriate use of them, can cause much suffering to talented persons, and possibly to other people in the world more widely.  

Far too many people with a talent for science, for example, place it in the service of money and/or aggression rather than in the service of peace.

What is the point in investing in enlightened philanthropy, of any sort, anywhere in the world, when so many societies and organisations are run by corrupt cliques and their cruel, greedy, sycophantic followers?

Well-informed kindness is incompatible with all forms of corruption.

How consistently do you make clear distinctions between appropriate comments and inappropriate ones? 

Why do so few people adequately establish appropriate boundaries between the public, the communal and the private aspects of their lives, and other people's lives? 

Why does political activity so often fail to support anyone, apart from the corrupt?

If you are still part of a corrupt system, you are likely to be corrupt yourself.  You are therefore unlikely to be an authentic intellectual or a political philanthropist.

Authentic intellectuals are conscientious.  That is why they prefer to resign from corrupt organisations rather than attempt to maintain a fake front of integrity. 

Becoming an authentic intellectual is not a matter of privilege.  It involves a refusal to co-operate with corrupt systems.  It simultaneously involves contributing to the improvement of non-corrupt systems. 

Any situation in which health is diminished is a no-win situation for the person or persons whose health suffers.  There is, in addition, a pattern of corruption allowing such situations to arise. 

The right to know, particularly about politics, reflects the necessity for public interest journalism.   

Public interest journalists are servants of democracy.

Unfortunately, many authentically pleasant persons, whether they are journalists or otherwise, have become seriously harmed when they have attempted to address selfishness, cruelty, exploitation and other sources of harm.

That has especially been the case when truly thoughtful, caring persons have had the intention of informing the public of serious wrongdoing.

Yet merely informing the public about wrongdoing is likely to be psychologically harmful in itself.  It only makes people feel even more powerless than before.

Many people are already too shocked and traumatised to overcome the serious harm they themselves have already suffered.  Further shocks are likely to make them feel greater despair, especially in societies with considerable, ingrained corruption.  And every society contains ingrained corruption to some extent.

When preventing corruption is impossible, what are good people meant to do?

The only alternative is to establish non-corrupt cultures and non-corrupt organisations, including non-corrupt political organisations.

Yet those cultures and organisations could quite easily be infiltrated by the corrupt, unless careful measures are in place to prevent that from occurring.

Perhaps you are seeking to know how that can be achieved.