[CNN News]  Google co-founder Sergey Brin on Friday said he’s optimistic that his search engine will not have to pull out of China over hacking and censorship issues.

Brin maintained that his Mountain View, California, company never entered China to make money. He said Google wanted to spread information.

“Perhaps people don’t believe this, but throughout all of the discussions of entering China our focus has really been what’s best for the Chinese people,” he said. “It’s not been about our revenue or profit or whatnot.”

He said the company will not continue to politically censor search results in China, which is one of the world’s largest markets for the Internet. But he did say that Google would agree to censoring pornography and other potentially objectionable material.

This particular story causes us to think about a much bigger issue: that of the unbiased spread of information. The Internet, coupled with search engines such as Google, has radically changed the way news events and other information is consumed by the public.

There are major consequences for this brick and mortar shift. On the one hand, the gatekeepers of the information industry, such as major daily newspapers and network TV anchors, have witnessed a dilution of their power in the delivery of news. On the other hand, this shift has resulted in an “opening of the gates” to a flood of information from any and every source — some trustworthy and some not trustworthy, but all with a bullhorn.

Much has been written about the demise of the major newspapers, which were once the pillars of their respective communities. Using news as their vehicle, they wielded political power that dictated the form and substance of the community. The economic fortunes of the newspaper families are the stuff of which legends are made. Today, those powered elite have been replaced by bloggers and Y-cams. Op-ed pieces have become the flavor of the day in print media, and “news shows” have taken stride to leave the anchor desk in the dust.

The unwary consumer, then, is left to do detailed searches in order to find the truth, because all of the news has become a point of view. The consumer must know whether what she or he is viewing or reading is from the neoconservative, theoconservative, economic conservative, conservative liberal, libertarian, social liberal, or anarcho-liberal point of view!

One of the greatest fears that people have always held was that their government would keep information from them. In a free democracy, the free and honest sharing of information (and news) is a cornerstone upon which the whole democratic system is built. People expect the information they receive to be accurate, objective and universal. The multi-faceted information products of today make it clear that what appears to be absolute truth in news is not, in fact, absolute truth — or news. It is, in fact, filtered through somebody’s point of view.

So often when we look at the big problems in our relationships or society, the answers are quite simple — but doing what it takes is not easy.  Although we could give many examples, we want to focus on one specific issue: fighting.  In a previous post we explored the basis of fighting in our nature, and how it impacts us at a personal level and affects our national discourse.

It is no secret to anyone who has been reading newspapers or watching TV that fighting and aggression have become far too common in our national discourse and character.  In much of the recent political fighting, each party suggests when the other party is in power that the other party has an underlying agenda to dissolve our democratic form of government in favor of socialism or a dictatorship.  Both sides use deliberately provocative, misleading and inflammatory language to confuse and enrage the public against the other side.  Here is a quote from Alexander Fraser Tytler (1748-1813) that provides an interesting perspective:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.  It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.  From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.  The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.  These nations have progressed through this sequence: ‘From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.’

What if the alternatives were moving from fighting to love, rather than moving from abundance to selfishness?  It’s simple, but it’s not easy.