On Government Secrets

 Spoiler: modern government is a cult. 

 Real spoiler: the secrets are all lawbreaking, lel. 

 "I’ll just say that much foreign policy criticism of this administration is met internally by sneers and claims of “you don’t know what you’re talking about.”"
https://twitter.com/alexbward/status/1807606650288615535

 "In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances." "‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know?'"

 The point of all these security clearances is precisely to foment this isolating attitude. To ensure you only accept instruction from your cult leader. Who you're not supposed to know the name or face of, lol, you don't have the clearance for that. 

 Don't have a cult of personality, how gauche. Have a mystery cult, lol. "whole libraries of hidden information"

 

 I've seen the ellsberg quote a couple times, but I obviously wasn't paying attention. Evil is stupid, and consequently it's incredibly revealing. So secret, lmao. "since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him." Note that this is a) spoken to someone without the clearances and b) appears in publications, meant for folk without any clearances at all. It's supposed to be misleading and manipulative. We'll see what it in fact is.

 

 "you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret."

 This is obviously complexity for the sake of social status. Complexity for the sake of looking sophisticated.
 Nobody needs this many levels of secrets. You can't even reasonably keep track of them; wait which precise level of secret was this secret? Can I tell this person, quick show me your sheet of clearances...because it's not as if they fit on a card...thus revealing that I know things I'm trying to keep secret...
 Which is exactly why you get two dozen at once. They have to be bundled or lumped. It's not even real complexity, it's the appearance of complexity. 

 We're about to find out that ellsberg takes it for granted that folks with clearances are basically incompetent morons, and kissinger doesn't laugh, he enters a state of deep respectful reflection. 

"First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you."

 Assuming the information is any good, that would be the sane response. A false assumption: we'll see it's journalist-tier. 

 Imagine getting the chance to try a bunch of new food. You're disappointed in the offerings of grocery stores, and you're sure the rich and powerful (the very richest!) can afford better food. Yes at first you're going to be very excited, because you forgot that Reality is a possibility.
 Then it turns out all they have is an epic junk food isle. That's Reality. Yes it's all [secret] and [expensive] junk, but it's still junk. 

 Human brains have buggy responses to new opportunities. Get caught in flights of fancy or catastrophizing instead of considering how similar situations resolved in the past. However it's not like this bug is itself a secret. Professionals are supposed to be aware of it and tamp it down. When someone can't ignore their field-relevant bugs, I deem them a non-professional. Tools, not tool-users. Cheap, cruddy tools at that.

 

 "But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t,"

 Again, assuming the information is any good.

 

 "which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess."

 The whole point is that you feel like a fool for having suggested something that, in light of the new information, makes no sense. "Oh they have a secret agreement with Putin not to deploy abrams, in return for Putin not crashing a market in Syria." Huh, I guess he wasn't overlooking the abrams for no reason, whoops.

 If you couldn't guess how they made the decisions, you wouldn't realize you did anything wrong. 

 I think ellsberg is right, though: he wasn't able to guess, and neither was kissinger. 

 "you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well."

 I.e. "Bro conspiracy theories are real, rofl." Yes, most of the government is conducted secretly. Public information has no bearing on what's actually going on. Consider 9/11 as an example. Imagine there really are 20 layers of secret stories about this event, and the stuff that shows up in truther sites or even newspapers can't reference any of them.

 Come to think that might be why Assange pissed them off so much. He publicized some of this "secret" information.

 And then they couldn't feel part of the club anymore, could they? At least, not about that.
 

 I suspect this secrecy was true of Rome as well. Gibbon wrote based on public information, and certainly the results of the policies can't be secret, but the motivations behind them are well beyond the ken of the likes of him. 

 Was Constantine a christian? Eh, probably not. He merely made christian-looking moves for materialist-strategic reasons. 

 "You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those other people are fools."

 Cult formation.

 Yes, you were fooled. This is most likely not because they're especially good at keeping secrets, but because you're a fool. Getting new clearances doesn't make you more competent, it merely increases the ways you can screw up. But anyway....

 Note the reflection. "Huh, I bet everyone in government thought I was a fool, the same way I think the outsiders are fools." Government thinks every voter is a fool. This is a sufficiently safe assumption, so by conspiracy and manipulation, they're not wrong.
 Because it's due to manipulation and conspiracy, if you are outside the government and not a fool, then they will never notice you're not a fool. Or, at best, they'll notice and be quite rationally terrified of you. "Oh shit, this guy knows more than me without any clearances. He could take down the entire government by himself if he wanted!"

 P.S. yes, you could. The scared little rat isn't wrong. However, if you're genuinely that wise, you know you don't want to. The rat can't imagine not wanting to. (My apologies to rats. They don't really deserve to be compared to government members. Probably won't stop, though.)

 

 "Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can."

 I.e. "Yeah it turns out our super top secret internal no-no information isn't any better than what you get in the newspapers."
 Turns out the government's ultra-classified documents - entirely hidden libraries of them! - are nothing more than gossip collections. 

 

 "In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances."

 And, of course, afterwards too. 

 "Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening."

 The reason it seems you can't get the government to listen to you is because you can't. They don't care what you have to say. You're not in the club.

 Except that mental exercise isn't torturous at all. It's an everyday thing for me, and I just sort of do it. This is because I'm not a mental midget.
 It's also because making it feel torturous is the exact point of the clearances. To get anyone who has them to stop listening to anyone who doesn't have them. Check: is the information special? We already know it's NYT-tier. Free, that is, worthless information. It's not the information that's the issue, it's a sneaky payload based on framing and presentation. They tell you so as to ensure you're aware you can't listen to anyone who hasn't listened.

 Literally a mystery cult. Not even a deviant variation, a regular-ass Egyptian mystery cult.
 Oh, but as is meet for Communist times, the secrets are bad. They suck.

 I don't have secret clearances, I have secrets that keep themselves. E.g. did you know you're already dead, this is the afterlife, and it's not the good place, it's the underworld. "What happens after you die?" *point in random direction* "That." I can tell this to basically anyone and it will remain secret.
 Heck, most talkers aren't even meaningfully verbal. Rather than, "What would they be saying if they knew what I knew?" It's, "What would they be saying if they knew what they knew?" I need to do transmutation to work out how to say what they're trying to say so I hear what they intend me to hear, never mind what they would be saying if they knew what I know.
 I have to correct their meaning because they get it wrong. Sure it's a hassle, but it's hardly [torturous].

 Non-morons can also simply ask.
 Curiosity, one of the great sins, according to black governments everywhere.
 Add in a little fluff for FUD, then ask: "How important is the Syrian market to you?" Okay you have this agreement with Putin and abrams you can't talk about, but you can build a model of his value schedule and simulate his ideas. It's extra steps, but it's not torturous.

 That is, unless you find curiosity torturous.
 Asking questions is, allegedly, a relationship of child to parent or pupil to master. As if kings didn't need to ask for information from their councilors. 

 Or, more importantly, never ask anything of outgroup. Ignore or command. Kissinger and ellsberg were only pretending to listen in the first place - Revenge is Sour. However, now they have a good excuse not to even pretend to listen. Pretending to listen anyway would, of course, be torturous.

 

 There's also the manipulation issue. I can't read them in even if I wanted to. If it's not about listening but getting a message across, well, I can't. I have to figure out what decision they would make if they could understand my secrets, then tell them something that will cause them to make that decision in light of their misunderstandings.
 My only problem with this process is that I'm too good at it. It turns out I'm not interested in the values of folk I can manipulate, it's all about maximizing advantage for me at minimum cost. 

 Btw, re: children. Often have to correct what they're trying to say, and always have to work out what they would be telling you if they were, you know, adults with knowledge instead of dumbass kids. Relevant to this issue due to fixed action patterns. Humans can't compartmentalize the like-a-child treatment away from the whole like-a-child package. Triggering one equivalent habit triggers the whole relationship. 

 Complexity for the sake of complexity is fine when you're making a toy.

 

 "You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him."

 If it seems like gov agents and journalists and marketers (but I repeat myself) seem like they're never genuine with you, it's because they're not.
 The worst part is commoners. They seem to like this. You can see genuine ads from time to time, by mistake. "It tastes awful, but it works." They go viral, but they don't move product.
 Worse, the commoner decides being fake and gay is high-status and acts that way to his wife, children, and neighbours. "If I'm gay and fake, just like the government, I will eventually become the government." 

 Corporations do the same thing with trade secrets. Those aren't even real secrets, but they manage to make them appear secret to CEOs and so on. 

 E.g. Elon Musk believes in global warming and AI threat due to [trade secrets]. You don't have anything you can say to him, according to him, without first learning these secrets. I would guess the other twitter accounts he talks to are also read in. Excepting, of course, the information: "it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can." I.e. it's lies.

 "The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron."

 Kek. [[Become]]. Revenge is Sour, my bros. The condition by which secret clearances can make you stupid is that you should already be a moron.

 

  "You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours."

 I think primarily the [[secrets]] is that global warming and tranny policies are scams. "Yeah uh nobody buys that shit up here." Yeah, now you really feel like a fool. You've been inveigling against this carbon tax or that for years, and all of a sudden it turns out they're doing it because they've been bribed. "They kept the secret from you so well."

 So yeah, gossip-tier information, plus corruption.
 The [misleading] information is telling you who you can get bribes from, by mistake or when out of date.
 The good stuff is telling you what laws you can get away with breaking and how. Except a bunch of that is internal warfare misinformation too, rofl.

 And it really is rational not to listen to anyone who isn't in on the bribes. It's not secret because you can get serious jail time for saying it, it's secret because of the extremely banal and mundane realities of bribes.
 As soon as anyone argued for policy based on merits instead of kickbacks, you know they aren't offering a kickback and their business has nothing to do with yours.

 

 Also the bribes and their inherent secrecy form a cult culture.

 "Kissinger hadn’t interrupted this long warning. As I’ve said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn’t take it as patronizing"

 I.e. "You, me, and everyone else in government is a moron, and you're going to be successfully inducted into their moron cult."
 "Hmm. Hmmm indeed. Food for thought."

 That or kissinger had an inkling he was about to be bribed/blackmailed, just as I would be thinking, and was doing the [torturous] transmutation.

 "But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn’t have the clearances yet."

 I.e. he hadn't been bribed yet, lol.
 Recall  the screed itself confesses to being manipulative. Carefully not mentioning the bribes makes it seem like the information is special, rather than...a banal criminal conspiracy. This is ellsberg relating the anecdote for public consumption, so it's likely not even accurate (like the NYT). The screed also confesses the information isn't special, but does so at one remove. Demonic chicken feet.