Socrates said in a dialogue with Crito: "You must either persuade [your country] or obey its orders, and endure in silence whatever it instructs you to endure... leads you into was to be wounded or killed, you must obey."
Socrates probably would have referred to Assange as a villain, not as a hero, for bringing transparency through illegal means rather than persuasion. "Illegal means" might be a bit exaggerated here since he didn't commit the crimes himself but he certainly encouraged them.
But Assange hasn't disobeyed his government, the Australian government.
Furthermore it would help to put some context here; Socrates never actually left Athens, his home city. he valued the individual acquisition of truth, but would he realistically apply the same rules to our open world than he did to his closed, incredibly small "country" where he nearly could personally know every single citizen (a few thousands)?
That's true, even more clear in the Gorgias than the Crito dialogue, that Socrates despised public persuasion by manipulation of the crowd's emotions. However, I don't recall mentioned even once that some truth aren't good to divulge; in fact, though this idea appears precisely in "the Laws", it's quite saliently the only Plato's dialogue where Socrates is absent...
> But Assange hasn't disobeyed his government, the Australian government.
I'm fairly sure there is an Australian law that (indirectly) says you are not allowed to steal from the U.S. government.
> That's true, even more clear in the Gorgias than the Crito dialogue, that Socrates despised public persuasion by manipulation of the crowd's emotions.
That's true, I wouldn't advocate this persuasion tactic either.
> However, I don't recall mentioned even once that some truth aren't good to divulge; in fact, though this idea appears precisely in "the Laws", it's quite saliently the only Plato's dialogue where Socrates is absent...
Are you suggesting no secrets are good to keep? I'm fairly sure Socrates would have kept his credit card number in 2011. I'm fairly sure Assange wouldn't divulge the name of his leakers.
All I'm saying is that in a free society, there are better ways to improve the world than breaking laws, one of them being persuasion. Otherwise, we fall in a dangerous trap where everybody is free to judge for themselves which laws they regard as moral or not. The leaks were probably a good thing but there is a greater principle at stake here.
Note that I'm saying this as a libertarian so I'm certainly not biased towards big government secrecy.
> All I'm saying is that in a free society, there are better ways to improve the world than breaking laws, one of them being persuasion.
At times when there is lots of pressure for generalised control and surveillance because it's simply made possible, it's in the contrary of tremendous importance for some courageous people to go against mainstream, to prevent what remains of our decadent democracies to fall into fascism. Free society is not a state of the matter, it's a process.
I suggest Socrates is not an authority you want to invoke on this topic. If nothing else, because he was unjustly executed partly for contempt of court.
Also, while it's usually good to comply with the law, I wouldn't recommend completely delegating your ethics to the US Congress.
