Transparency is becoming a fundamental right. Society demands it. Must it be so?

In the old days the only documents providing great transparency to everyone were the telephone directory and encyclopedias. But since, things have become more varied and complex, although not necessarily more interesting.

Statement of accounts, tax returns, taxable and tax-free assets, interests and participations, club memberships and allegiance to lobbies, financing of political parties or of a softball club, love life, health records, dog training, procedure used to elect Miss Universe, brushing teeth, colonoscopy: everything must be transparent.

There is only one small problem: do we really see it better?

Take a perfectly translucent substance, e.g. pure water. Let’s disperse it into small droplets, each remaining perfectly transparent. And launch it all in air, another perfectly transparent media. What effect has this? A good thick fog!

Crutches are made available in the form of search engines to find the one droplet of interest. But we do not know by what criteria these engines select and order the priorities. Google and Wikipedia should really be more transparent!

Having understood this, astute people try to reverse the system and would like the media to become the actor providing transparency: printed press on paper or electronically, television and radio channels, blogs, and newsletters. Everyone takes the same subject and treats it in such detail that it will be hard to distinguish the fundamental from the trivial. Many bubbles in water cause it also to lose its transparency. The subject becomes blurred by the multiplicity of analyzes; consistency, if any, is dismembered. Analysis kills diagnosis.
To see something you must decant it from the background, which means to let things rest until phases separate. The finer the particles the more stable will be the emulsion, the longer time it will take to get a clear picture. This is what is called “cool down, step back, be patient!”

Once subject and media are separated, content will appear that was impossible to detect when everything was stirred and dispersed. It is then straightforward to analyze the subject matter, freed from the motivations of the media; and everyone can form their own opinions without being troubled by a cloud of smoke.