Reasons for an open society and goverment

As has been seen in my previous posts I am a strong proponent for what I term an open society. That is a society in which all centralized government functions are open to all eyes with little or no barrier of entry. An example would be have providing all records and transcripts of city meetings online as well as in person. Online and in person are both barriers as they require net access and transportation respectively, but acquiring one of those is within the means of most citizens of my current city. This is opposed to having to file a law suit in order to gain access like many governments require in the real world.

There are two positions to argue against this type of government from.  In this post I would like to address some of objections from those two positions.  The two positions are that governments must keep secrets from their citizens and the other that all governments are immoral/wrong.  I will start with the position that the government must keep secrets.

There is only one really valid reason to keep secrets for a government is to protect it’s citizens.  That isn’t to say that is the only reason governments keep secrets, but if the government is working in it’s citizens’ collective best interests then the others are not valid.  That governments should only act in their citizens’ collective best interests is an entire argument in itself, so for now I’ll treat it as axiomatic.

So why is keeping secrets in the citizen’s best interests?  Well the first is to protect them from enemies from without and the other from enemies within.  The enemies from without can actually be lumped in with enemies from with in as if we block all outside access to our information, people from the inside will tell others the information.  This is because it is impossible to isolate the citizens of a government from others.

So is it possible to make the information free to everyone yet protect ourselves.  The first big problem that people might think of is an enemy having access to the blueprints of our infrastructure.  One could argue that having these plans could allow an attacker to figure out ways of attacking that could harm us. On the other hand many security experts will tell you having hidden flaws is worse then making them public.  This is because when they are public people will notice them and then you can fix them.  When you hide them under the rug people will find them anyway and you will be totally unprepared for an attack.  Also you will tend to build things that can survive an attack through redundancy or other methods should you suffer an attack, rather then feeling safe behind a veil of secrets.

So knowing that openness improves our infrastructure’s security we have to ask about the other two big war things, battle plans and weapons.  In actual war there is some level of value to secrecy.  This value can secured without much cost to openness.  The first thing to understand is that it’s ok to have a small time delay in something coming become open.  The object is of course to make this delay as short as possible.  For example when I’m writing a program, a log of ideas that I tried might be useful to someone, but I don’t have to make the tries instantly available and I should try each idea before writing them up in my log.

The same concept came be applied to the military during war time.  Since one of the goals of an open society is to reduce coercion and preemptive war is always coercion we can reject the idea that in non-war time the military needs secrets.  In war time information should be made non-secret as soon as possible, and all should be out as soon as war is over.  There may be an argument that shows that even during war time there is a reason to not have secrets, but I haven’t found a good one.

The other war case is that of weapons designs.  The objection here is that if everyone knows how to make our weapons then we will be defenseless.  This has two problems, first if our weapons are defensive in nature it’s hard to use them offensively against us.  Also if they are getting all their weapons from us we also know what their weapons abilities are making it a very level playing field.   The other problem is it turns out that when both sides of a conflict have equal footing they are less likely to fight.  For example a man with a gun vs a man without one, the chances of them fighting are higher then if both have a gun and even less then that are if neither have a gun.  So the minimum level of protection needed to balance the playing field is the correct amount.

The other argument is that sometimes there is information on people that needs to be sealed and protected to allow them to continue living a normal life.  This argument has weight but I do believe that if everything was open there would be few socially prohibited activities and with correct education people would be able to move from criminality to productive members of society with pride in overcoming their problems rather then stigma with the problem itself.

Now lets look at the other side of the issue.  That is to say government is wrong and should never exist at all.  First I need to set up some things about a open society that are needed to  counter these arguments.  The first is that the boarder of the society has to be open as well. This means that belonging to the society is in fact optional.  That doesn’t mean that everything about the society will be agreeable to everyone, but the people who are living in the society agree that even thought they disagree it’s still worth being there.  That is to say that one can assert that all people with in the society who are able to make choices for themselves are there willingly.

This is kinda like a contract with the society.  The contract basically states that while you are in the society you agree to follow the rules of said society, and if you don’t want to you can just leave.  If you want to follow the rules again we will let you back in.  Also there would have to be some form of direct democracy with a threshold nearer to 100% then 51% in order to pass laws and such.  You need the high threshold so that all policies of the society are closer in phase with the feeling of the people in the society.  It also makes it harder to get things passed with mass manipulation the higher the threshold.

If the society contains these properties and the government of the society is based on them then there really isn’t any coercion because you are giving at least implicit consent to have the rules enforced, although some form of explicit consent would be better. For example when I goto my friends house I am making a statement that I will follow the rules of that house.  If me and my friend live together we have a set of rules based on agreement between us.  If a new person wants to live with us, he or she consents to our rules by moving in although they can renegotiate them.  If one of us doesn’t like the new rules and there is no penalty for leaving then we can move out.

This is also part of the openness of the society.  The society and government are open so people know what they are about. The boarders are open so entry and exit of the society has little or no cost so people can leave.  The openness of society allows the improvement of systems to work by opening them up to scrutiny.  The knowledge bases of society increases as there is no form of owned knowledge. The security of the society is increased as flaws are exposed and fixed.  People know what is going on around them and stigma of not fitting in is reduced as people know that everyone doesn’t really fit in.  This in turn reduces the fear in society. These are a few of the reasons I believe a open society is something worth working towards.