THE DECEIT OF TRANSPARENCY

"Transparency is the trick for not letting things be seen". Emilio Mordini, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has taught at various Italian and foreign universities and is currently a member of the European Commission's group of experts on research and innovation for security, can capture one of the cardinal values of European governance in two words.

You love provocations: transparency is one of the principles of the European Commission's 2001 White Paper on Governance, the philosophical and political document on the basis of which Europe decided what kind of governance it wanted to give itself...

This paper was also drafted to address the democratic deficit that plagues the EU: the EU has a government that is not elected by the Parliament, and the Parliament does not have full legislative power.

The European institutions value all forms of participatory democracy....

Perhaps they do so in order to excuse their original sin. The EU is far from fulfilling the classical canons of democracy.

Let me ask you a question.

I am asking you: what does the word transparency mean to citizens?

Allow citizens to enter the institutions. The building that houses the European Commission in Brussels, the Berlaymont, is made of crystal....

In fact, transparency even finds its architectural materiality: transparent buildings, not just metaphorically. Have you ever walked through a door?

Once, through a glass door.

All glass - and why?

I did not see it.

Exactly. What does it mean to be transparent?

Not to see and not to be seen.

There you have given yourself the answer: it is not true that transparency is only for showing.  Transparency lets you see some things but hides others.  A transparent wall lets you see what is behind it, but you no longer see the wall.  Transparency lets you see the officer working in the building, but you no longer see the building.

But is not seeing the officer the most important thing?

It depends, considering that on the other side there are surveillance technologies. These, yes, allow you to know everything that citizens are doing.

There are privacy laws.

A formality. None of us are aware of the thousands of surveillance technologies we are immersed in.

A concrete example?

We fill the city with cameras, but we put up a nice sign saying "this area is under video surveillance" - we were transparent, right? At this point, the citizen sees the notice, reads it, forgets about it, and acts as if the cameras were not there.

If you have nothing to hide, what is the problem?

Nothing. But transparency in this sense becomes more and more of a power transfer.

Is it a red herring?

The message is: the state has no secrets; the citizen has no reason to suspect.

Is that really the case?

No. Societies have become different from the values they used to promote, but living in a state of lies is a struggle. When that happens, you are moving towards the collapse of societies.

So, what is the point of promoting transparency?

To make citizens believe that they can control the state.

But this principle seems to have been twisted and turned upside down: it is the citizens who no longer have secrets from the state.

They do.

So, do the institutions really hide things?

Not exactly. In the world of the Internet, it is not possible to hide anything. If you want to hide something, you must multiply the information and hide the important information among so much fluff that it cannot be found.

Does transparency serve to control citizens?

No: it is to keep citizens from noticing surveillance, which is different.

How did we get here?

The problem of the democratic deficit is not unique to Europe: as democratic states hardly respected the values they promoted; people began to disengage from politics. At this point, those in power began to look for tools that would give the citizen at least the illusion of "control": transparency is one of them.

But when someone noticed, the EU's answer was the DSA, the law that allows censorship of so-called fake news.

Let us go step by step: before the DSA, we experienced two techniques of control on our skin. The first is the one that has always been used in institutions where people must obey: barracks, monasteries, and prisons. In these places, one of the most established techniques is to give absurd orders. It is the pattern of Caligula, who elects his horse as senator. Caligula is not crazy: he wants to humiliate the Senate. When people get used to the absurd order, they eventually suspend judgment, as in the recent pandemic.

What about the second technique of control?

It is the so-called "war on disinformation". You start softly, with fact-checking, and soon you get to laws like the DSA, which threatens to criminalize dissent.

What is the goal?

The ultimate goal is always the same: power. Power is for all of us the ability to fulfill our desires in an absolute way. So much so that when Dante Alighieri wants to describe God, he says of him "vuolsi così colà dove si puote ciò che si vuole" (It is so willed where will and power are one). Power is not satisfied with satisfying its own desires, it also seeks to control the desires of the people. And here the rulers deceive themselves, because they can control the desires of their "subjects", but not their own.

In what sense?

The Gospel says much more about human beings than Freud. Consider the parable of the rich fool who, having accumulated great wealth, decides to enjoy life, not knowing that he will die that very night. The powerful believe they have power over others, but they do not even have power over themselves. Faced with this inescapable lack of power, people should become a little wiser.

But instead?

Instead, they go mad, as is happening in our civilization of technology and money.