Oscar winning actor, Denzel Washington once asked “What are the consequences of having too much information? If I don’t watch the news I’m uninformed but if I watch the news I’m misinformed.”

The world has been managing the shock of the release of the files that show a certain branch of the elite across the world as a pack of deviants. On the surface, we see behavior that demonstrates appetites most average people either cannot relate to or afford to get away with. They were all crimes. However, on a religious note, there is some consistency with some rituals from the days of the Babylonian empire. This is an empire we often believe is long past and gone. When we see accounts of ritualistic infanticide and cannibalism, we are confronted with dark realization about the people who rule and judge over us.

The more you know the more you owe. Information obliges us to action. Because by being informed we are supposedly more enlightened and thus we need to imbue our environment with our newly acquired enlightenment. The operating assumption of enlightenment is that it often confirms our ethics or renders a more perfect version of it. No matter the variety of information we consume we are often optimized for information that aligns with our underlying ethics or at least the ethics we are trained to defend.

We defend according to the institutional agreements. For matters of health, we defer to the National Institute of Health. For matters of physics, we defer to the professors at MIT, Caltech. For matters of history, we defer to the historians at our museums and premier liberal arts institutions. However, when we come across new information that challenges what they affirm it creates a conundrum of indecision or bad decisions. How useful is information if we cannot agree on its authority? How useful is information if we do not have the authority to verify it or enforce what it alleges.

Upon the release of the “The Files”, most people can only do so much with the information we are given no matter how true it is. If those in authority cannot take action to confirm or defend our underlying ethics, then the information is de facto useless.

So what is the purpose of information, to enlighten or to enable? We could argue that excessive information is overwhelming. But when large amounts of information conflict with our underlying ethics or values one could suppose the inaction is a confluence of ethical conflict and sensory overload. Thus, who wins? He who has a plan of action or a strategy regardless of the information. Information is an update on action(s). Thus, he who is most active directs information. Thus, if you follow information, you end up being at the mercy of those who are always in action.

by Julian Michael Yong