One metaphor in the final paragraph of an Italian publications’s poorly translated, recent interview with Julian Assange riveted me. Indeed, pondering its implications filled me with energy! I put the metaphor in bold. The rest of the interview is also well worth reading, especially Assange’s remarks on the difference between Hillary and Trump.
Interviewer: One of the first times we met, there was a book on his desk: “The Prince” by Machiavelli. What did he learn of the power in ten years of WikiLeaks?
“I came to the conclusion that most of the power structures are deeply incompetent, filled with people who do not really believe the institutions to which they belong, and that much of the power is, in fact, the perception of power. And the more they work in secret plus they are incompetent, because the secrecy generates incompetence, while the transparency of gender competence, because it makes it possible to compare the different actions and determine which is the most effective. In order to maintain the appearance of power, the heads of the institutions or policy, such as Presidents, spend most of their time trying to walk in front of the train, while pretending that it is to follow them, but the direction is fixed from the tracks and the train engine.
Understanding this means understanding that smaller organizations and motivated people can defeat these institutional dinosaurs as the State Department, the CIA or the NSA “.
